Question

Code is the text that makes up programs. Most chapters in this book contain quite a lot of it. In my experience, reading code and writing code are indispensable parts of learning to program, so try to not just glance over the examples. Read them attentively and understand them. This may be slow and confusing at first, but I promise that you will quickly get the hang of it. The same goes for the exercises. Don’t assume you understand them until you’ve actually written a working solution.

I recommend you try your solutions to exercises in an actual JavaScript interpreter. That way, you’ll get immediate feedback on whether what you are doing is working, and, I hope, you’ll be tempted to experiment and go beyond the exercises.

The easiest way to run the example code in the book, and to experiment with it, is to look it up in the online version of the book at eloquentjavascript.net . There, you can click any code example to edit and run it and to see the output it produces. To work on the exercises, go to eloquentjavascript.net/code , which provides starting code for each coding exercise and allows you to look at the solutions.

If you want to run the programs defined in this book outside of the book’s sandbox, some care is required. Many examples stand on their own and should work in any JavaScript environment. But code in later chapters is mostly written for a specific environment (the browser or Node.js) and can run only there. In addition, many chapters define bigger programs, and the pieces of code that appear in them depend on each other or on external files. The sandbox on the website provides links to Zip files containing all of the scripts and data files necessary to run the code for a given chapter.

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