Question

Often, you will need a value that simply distinguishes between two possibilities, like “yes” and “no” or “on” and “off”. For this, JavaScript has a Boolean type, which has just two values: true and false (which are written simply as those words).

Comparisons

Here is one way to produce Boolean values:

console.log(3 > 2)
// → true
console.log(3 < 2)
// → false

The > and < signs are the traditional symbols for “is greater than” and “is less than”, respectively. They are binary operators. Applying them results in a Boolean value that indicates whether they hold true in this case.

Strings can be compared in the same way.

console.log("Aardvark" < "Zoroaster")
// → true

The way strings are ordered is more or less alphabetic: uppercase letters are always “less” than lowercase ones, so "Z" < "a" is true, and non-alphabetic characters (!, -, and so on) are also included in the ordering. The actual comparison is based on the Unicode standard. This standard assigns a number to virtually every character you would ever need, including characters from Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Tamil, and so on. Having such numbers is useful for storing strings inside a computer because it makes it possible to represent them as a sequence of numbers. When comparing strings, JavaScript goes over them from left to right, comparing the numeric codes of the characters one by one.

Other similar operators are >= (greater than or equal to), <= (less than or equal to), == (equal to), and != (not equal to).

console.log("Itchy" != "Scratchy")
// → true

There is only one value in JavaScript that is not equal to itself, and that is NaN , which stands for “not a number”.

console.log(NaN == NaN)
// → false

NaN is supposed to denote the result of a nonsensical computation, and as such, it isn’t equal to the result of any other nonsensical computations.

Logical operators

There are also some operations that can be applied to Boolean values themselves. JavaScript supports three logical operators: and, or, and not. These can be used to “reason” about Booleans.

The && operator represents logical and. It is a binary operator, and its result is true only if both the values given to it are true.

console.log(true && false)
// → false
console.log(true && true)
// → true

The || operator denotes logical or. It produces true if either of the values given to it is true.

console.log(false || true)
// → true
console.log(false || false)
// → false

Not is written as an exclamation mark ( ! ). It is a unary operator that flips the value given to it— !true produces false and !false gives true .

When mixing these Boolean operators with arithmetic and other operators, it is not always obvious when parentheses are needed. In practice, you can usually get by with knowing that of the operators we have seen so far, || has the lowest precedence, then comes && , then the comparison operators ( > , == , and so on), and then the rest. This order has been chosen such that, in typical expressions like the following one, as few parentheses as possible are necessary:

1 + 1 == 2 && 10 * 10 > 50

The last logical operator I will discuss is not unary, not binary, but ternary, operating on three values. It is written with a question mark and a colon, like this:

console.log(true ? 1 : 2);
// → 1
console.log(false ? 1 : 2);
// → 2

This one is called the conditional operator (or sometimes just ternary operator since it is the only such operator in the language). The value on the left of the question mark “picks” which of the other two values will come out. When it is true, the middle value is chosen, and when it is false, the value on the right comes out.

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.