<aside> 💡 Welcome to the mentored project! We'll start off by learning JavaScript, which we'll be working with for the majority of this course. While this guide is tailored towards complete beginners, we encourage you to skim through even if you're an experienced JS hacker!
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Since JavaScript is the language of the web, you can run it directly within your web browser! I’m going to be using Chrome since it’s the most popular browser, but feel free to use whichever browser you want — they’re all very similar.
For Chrome,
Once you get this screen on your right sidebar, feel free to move to the next step.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/wYNemeu5LVZEu_50QtZJgWyO1AaPQ9zr07R3XoIHVmBq09VpWFFF5xu4Did2Q505KmZc2xbV8_Vn3CfO6U8mveO4AS5R1wOS_bssPC2O-6bJdm-xTykvgX0xBwMnbv963jpNv_JV
If you'd prefer to work within a structured course, feel free to use Codecademy's Introduction to Javascript (up to objects) instead. We cover really similar content, but this guide moves a bit faster and I (personally) think it's more fun 😈
To kick things off, type this in your browser console
console.log('Hello, world!');
That’s it! Pretty simple and straightforward. If you’ve worked with other high-level languages like Java, this may seem too short. But there really isn’t that much too it. Let’s run it.
You should get this result:
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/2k5i3ga8LggNXdkyUfrqlmNC3kYSfNeZ-P0qvRBKdsEPnQTK3Y3QnkSLRbcDja1xGD9xyozvKJGpb-Oiwkf5Bq9kcC1lkD5qi74Ub7gT7mEXjQPRP15PZIT4ndSPO9XPO6nCguoq
And that’s our first line of JavaScript code! We successfully logged ‘Hello, world!’ to the console.
The single quotes ‘ exist to designate Hello World as a string, or text, rather than a variable (see next section), and the semicolons exist to separate different lines of code.
What are console and log and what do they represent? You don’t need to understand this now (I certainly didn’t), and we will cover this later in functions and object-oriented-programming.