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Eloquent JavaScript A Modern Introduction to
Programming 2nd Edition Marijn Haverbeke Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): Marijn Haverbeke
ISBN(s): 9781593275846, 1593275846
Edition: 2
File Details: PDF, 3.15 MB
Year: 2014
Language: english
 Eloquent JavaScript
A Modern Introduction to Programming

Marijn Haverbeke
Copyright © 2014 by Marijn Haverbeke

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial

license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/). All code in the
book may also be considered licensed under an MIT license (http://
opensource.org/licenses/MIT).
The illustrations are contributed by various artists: Cover by Wasif
Hyder. Computer (introduction) and unicycle people (Chapter 21) by
Max Xiantu. Sea of bits (Chapter 1) and weresquirrel (Chapter 4) by
Margarita Martínez and José Menor. Octopuses (Chapter 2 and 4) by
Jim Tierney. Object with on/off switch (Chapter 6) by Dyle MacGregor.
Regular expression diagrams in Chapter 9 generated with regexper.com
by Jeff Avallone. Game concept for Chapter 15 by Thomas Palef. Pixel
art in Chapter 16 by Antonio Perdomo Pastor.
The second edition of Eloquent JavaScript was made possible by 454
financial backers.

You can buy a print version of this book, with an extra bonus chapter
included, printed by No Starch Press at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/
1593275846/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=
1593275846&linkCode=as2&tag=marijhaver-20&linkId=VPXXXSRYC5COG5R5.

i
Contents
On programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Why language matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
What is JavaScript? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Code, and what to do with it . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Typographic conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

1 Values, Types, and Operators 10

Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Strings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Unary operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Boolean values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
Undefined values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Automatic type conversion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

2 Program Structure 22
Expressions and statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Keywords and reserved words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
The environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
The console.log function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Return values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
prompt and confirm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Control flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Conditional execution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
while and do loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Indenting Code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
for loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

ii
 Breaking Out of a Loop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Updating variables succinctly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Dispatching on a value with switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Capitalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

3 Functions 41
Defining a function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Parameters and scopes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Nested scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Functions as values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Declaration notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
The call stack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Optional Arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Closure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Recursion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Growing functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Functions and side effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

4 Data Structures: Objects and Arrays 60

The weresquirrel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Data sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Mutability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
The lycanthrope’s log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
Computing correlation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Objects as maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
The final analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Further arrayology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Strings and their properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
The arguments object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

iii
 The Math object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
The global object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

5 Higher-Order Functions 85
Abstraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
Abstracting array traversal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Higher-order functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Passing along arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
JSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Filtering an array . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Transforming with map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Summarizing with reduce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Composability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
The cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Great-great-great-great-… . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Binding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

6 The Secret Life of Objects 104

History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Prototypes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Constructors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
Overriding derived properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Prototype interference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Prototype-less objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Polymorphism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Laying out a table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
Getters and setters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
Inheritance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
The instanceof operator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

iv
7 Project: Electronic Life 127
Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Representing space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
A critter’s programming interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
The world object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
this and its scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Animating life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
It moves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
More life forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
A more lifelike simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
Action handlers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Populating the new world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
Bringing it to life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

8 Bugs and Error Handling 147

Programmer mistakes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Strict mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Debugging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Error propagation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
Exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
Cleaning up after exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
Selective catching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Assertions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

9 Regular Expressions 162

Creating a regular expression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Testing for matches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Matching a set of characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
Repeating parts of a pattern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Grouping subexpressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Matches and groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
The date type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
Word and string boundaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

v
 Choice patterns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
The mechanics of matching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
Backtracking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
The replace method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Greed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Dynamically creating RegExp objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
The search method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
The lastIndex property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
Parsing an INI file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
International characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184

10 Modules 186
Why modules help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186
Using functions as namespaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Objects as interfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
Detaching from the global scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
Evaluating data as code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
Require . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Slow-loading modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
Interface design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

11 Project: A Programming Language 203

Parsing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203
The evaluator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
Special forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
The environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Compilation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
Cheating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

12 JavaScript and the Browser 218

Networks and the Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

vi
 The Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
HTML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
HTML and JavaScript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
In the sandbox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Compatibility and the browser wars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225

13 The Document Object Model 227

Document structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
The standard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
Moving through the tree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
Finding elements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
Changing the document . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Creating nodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
Layout . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238
Styling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
Cascading styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
Query selectors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Positioning and animating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248

14 Handling Events 250

Event handlers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
Events and DOM nodes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Event objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
Propagation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
Default actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
Key events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
Mouse clicks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
Mouse motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
Scroll events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
Focus events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262
Load event . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Script execution timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Setting timers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

vii
 Debouncing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

15 Project: A Platform Game 270

The game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
The technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
Reading a level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Actors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274
Encapsulation as a burden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
Drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278
Motion and collision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Actors and actions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286
Tracking keys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 290
Running the game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293

16 Drawing on Canvas 295

SVG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
The canvas element . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
Filling and stroking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
Paths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298
Curves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
Drawing a pie chart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 304
Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308
Storing and clearing transformations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310
Back to the game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312
Choosing a graphics interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320

17 HTTP 323
The protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
Browsers and HTTP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

viii
 XMLHttpRequest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Sending a request . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Asynchronous Requests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
Fetching XML Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
HTTP sandboxing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
Abstracting requests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331
Promises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
Appreciating HTTP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
Security and HTTPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339

18 Forms and Form Fields 341

Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
Focus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
Disabled fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
The form as a whole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 344
Text fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
Checkboxes and radio buttons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
Select fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348
File fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
Storing data client-side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 356

19 Project: A Paint Program 358

Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359
Building up the DOM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360
The foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Tool selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362
Color and brush size . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365
Saving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366
Loading image files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 368
Finishing up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 370
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 371

ix
20 Node.js 375
Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
Asynchronicity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
The node command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
Installing with NPM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
The file system module . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
The HTTP module . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383
Streams . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385
A simple file server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
Error handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 392
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395

21 Project: Skill-Sharing Website 398

Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399
Long polling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400
HTTP interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401
The server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
The client . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 412
Exercises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 420
Program Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423
Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 424
Data Structures: Objects and Arrays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425
Higher-Order Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427
The Secret Life of Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428
Project: Electronic Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429
Bugs and Error Handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
Regular Expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 431
Modules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 432
Project: A Programming Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 434
The Document Object Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435
Handling Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 436
Project: A Platform Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437
Drawing on Canvas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 438
HTTP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 440
Forms and Form Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441

x
Project: A Paint Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443
Node.js . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 445
Project: Skill-Sharing Website . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447

xi
Introduction
This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do.
Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but contain a lot
more hidden complexity, and thus are harder to operate and understand.
To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.

We’ve found two effective ways of bridging the communication gap be-
tween us, squishy biological organisms with a talent for social and spatial
reasoning, and the computer, unfeeling manipulator of meaningless data.
The first is to appeal to our sense of the physical world, and build in-
terfaces that mimic that world, and allow us to manipulate shapes on a
screen with our fingers. This works very well for casual machine inter-
action.
But we have not yet found a good way to use the point-and-click ap-
proach to communicate things to the computer that the designer of the
interface did not anticipate. For open-ended interfaces, such as instruct-
ing the computer to perform arbitrary tasks, we’ve had more luck with
an approach that makes use of our talent for language: teaching the
machine a language.
Human languages allow words and subsentences to be combined in
many, many ways, allowing us to say many, many different things. Com-
puter languages, though typically less grammatically flexible, follow a

1
similar principle.
Casual computing has become much more widespread in the past
twenty years, and language-based interfaces, which once were the de-
fault way in which people interacted with computers, have largely been
replaced with graphical interfaces. But they are still there, if you know
where to look. One such language, JavaScript, is built into just about
every web browser, and thus available on just about every consumer
device.
This book intends to make you familiar enough with this language to
be able to make a computer do what you want.

On programming
I do not enlighten those who are not eager to learn, nor arouse
those who are not anxious to give an explanation themselves.
If I have presented one corner of the square and they cannot
come back to me with the other three, I should not go over
the points again.
—Confucius

Besides explaining JavaScript, I also want to introduce the basic prin-

ciples of programming. Programming, it turns out, is hard. The funda-
mental rules are typically simple and clear. But programs, built on top
of these basic rules, tend to become complex enough to introduce their
own rules and complexity. You’re building your own maze, in a way,
and might just get lost in it.
There will be times at which reading this book feels terribly frustrating.
If you are new to programming, there will be a lot of new material to
digest. Much of this material will then be combined in ways that require
you to make additional connections.
It is up to you to make the effort necessary. When you are struggling
to follow the book, do not jump to any conclusions about your own
capabilities. You are fine—you just need to keep at it. Take a break, re-
read some material, and always make sure you read and understand the
example programs and exercises. Learning is hard work, but everything
you learn is yours, and will make subsequent learning easier.

2
 The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which
he [sic] alone is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited
complexity can be created in the form of computer programs.
—Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason

A program is many things. It is a piece of text typed by a programmer,

it is the directing force that makes the computer do what it does, it is
data in the computer’s memory, yet it controls the actions performed on
this same memory. Analogies that try to compare programs to objects
we are familiar with tend to fall short. A superficially fitting one is that
of a machine—lots of separate parts tend to be involved, and to make
the whole thing tick we have to consider the ways in which these parts
interconnect and contribute to the operation of the whole.
A computer is a machine built to act as a host for these immaterial
machines. Computers themselves can only do stupidly straightforward
things. The reason they are so useful is that they do these things at
an incredibly high speed. A program can ingeniously combine enormous
numbers of these simple actions in order to do very complicated things.
To some of us, writing computer programs is a fascinating game. A
program is a building of thought. It is costless to build, it is weightless,
and it grows easily under our typing hands.
If we are not careful, its size and complexity will grow out of control,
confusing even the person who created it. This is the main problem of
programming: keeping programs under control. When a program works,
it is beautiful. The art of programming is the skill of controlling com-
plexity. The great program is subdued, made simple in its complexity.
Many programmers believe that this complexity is best managed by
using only a small set of well-understood techniques in their programs.
They have composed strict rules (“best practices”) prescribing the form
programs should have, and the more zealous among them will consider
those that go outside of this little safe zone to be bad programmers.
What hostility to the richness of programming—to try to reduce it
to something straightforward and predictable, to place a taboo on all
the weird and beautiful programs! The landscape of programming tech-
niques is enormous, fascinating in its diversity, and still largely unex-
plored. It is certainly dangerous going, luring the inexperienced pro-
grammer into all kinds of confusion, but that only means you should

3
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