Before you jump into learning how to write JavaScript code, it’s super important to understand what JavaScript is, and what it’s used for, so you don’t waste time learning a language that isn’t going to help you create what you really want or need to build. So in this post, I’m going to help you make sure that JavaScript is the language you should be learning right now.

Is JavaScript the right language for you?

JavaScript is primarily a web language, which means its used to build websites for the most part. So, if you’re really interested in making iPhone apps, it might not be the best language to help you do that. If you want to build iPhone apps, you might want to learn Objective-C or Swift instead. If you want to build Android apps, I’d suggest learning the Android programming language which is built on Java. And that brings me to an important distinction. Java and JavaScript are two completely different programming languages, so don’t get them confused. If you are wanting to get into Data Science, languages like R (yes, it's name is literally the letter "R") and Python are great for processing huge amounts of data to make it easier for humans to understand. There are lots of languages that are used to do lots of differnt things and I’ve mentioned only a few. So, if there is a programming language that you are curious about that I did not mention, feel free to shoot me an email to ask about it. And if there is something specific that you are wanting to build and you’re not sure what language you should learn in order to do that, again, just reach out and I will be more than happy to point you in the right direction.

What is JavaScript used for?

Now, to bring it back to JavaScript, if you want to build websites, or web apps, or anything that runs in a browser like Chrome or Firefox or Safari, then you are in the right place because JavaScript is going to be really important to you and I am here to help you learn JavaScript and use it to build awesome interactive web experiences!

Front-end & Back-end Web Development

JavaScript that runs in the browser alongside HTML & CSS is used for front-end web development. Additionally, JavaScript can be used for back-end web development to build server-side applications using Node.js (More on front-end vs back-end in another post).

Native & Progressive Mobile Apps

While JavaScript is used primarily to build websites, there are lots of tools that make it so that you can use JavaScript to build apps for iOS & Android like React Native, or the Ionic framework among others. For an example of what a React Native app looks and feels like, download the Florida Pycon app for iOS and Android. I built it! :D

Desktop Apps

You can even build apps that run on Mac, Windows, and Linux using a framework called Electron. In fact, I've built a desktop app called ReQLPro using JavaScript and Electron. The popular Slack app is also built on Electron.

Who am I and what do I know about JavaScript?

I’ve been building websites since 2006 and I’ve been using JavaScript heavily to build web applications since 2012 (I’ll get into more on the difference between websites and web apps in another post). I became interested in HTML & CSS through customizing my Myspace page. If you don’t know what Myspace is, I’m sorry you missed out. It was way better than Facebook in my opinion, especially if you're into music or in a band, because you could fully customize the look and feel of your profile using HTML & CSS. Myspace is still around suprisingly but its way different and I have no idea who is actually using it anymore...

If you want to learn more about me, click around my website, check out my work, and read some more of my posts. I hope you enjoy learning JavaScript and find some helpful resources in my blog. If you have any questions that I haven't answered in a post, please send me an email and I would be so happy to write something up for you. :) Happy coding!