Welcome to the gecko-ak.org Javascript development pages!

A little while ago, I decided I wanted to learn Javascript. I bought a book on the topic, did a little searching on-line, but I didn't learn much more than how to create an alert window. A year or two passed, and many of the IT forums I frequent were filled with posts on "AJAX" and "Web2.0". If you hate buzzwords, don't worry -- so do I, and so I promise that this paragraph will be the last time you see "Web2.0" in this tutorial, and when I mention AJAX, it will be in the context of teaching a Javascript principle that is used in an AJAX application.

So why another Javascript tutorial? Like I mentioned above, the first time I tried to learn Javascript, I wasn't successful. I really didn't have time to go through a book, and a lot of on-line tutorials are brief to the point of being little more than a reference for someone who already knows the language. So, in these pages, I am trying to strike a balance between covering the major topics in enough detail to teach the Javascript newbie the language while keeping each lesson brief enough for someone (like me) who is trying to squeeze a lesson into their already busy life.

In these pages, I break Javascript programming down into a series of bite-sized lessons that begin with the obligatory "hello world" script and gradually build to more advanced topics like dynamic HTML, dynamic images/animation and simple AJAX programming. I firmly believe you learn by doing, so when I was learning Javascript, I'd read a tutorial on-line or in my Sam's book, then open up a shell on my web server to try out what I had just learned. Each of the lessons I've written ends with a link to an example of the topic I've just covered. I encourage you to click the link to the examples, then use the "view source" function of your web browser to check out the source code to the Javascript in the example. Copy it to your computer, change it, play with it and learn what makes it work (and maybe even more important, what makes it break).

Good luck, and enjoy!