A new video series for beginners to learn JavaScript

There’s a popular saying that reads “Any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript.” Known as Atwood’s Law, it highlights the flexibility of the language: JavaScript is already everywhere and its popularity only continues to grow.

Born of humble beginnings as an extension for the Netscape Navigator web browser almost 25 years ago, JavaScript blossomed to become a powerful programming language for creating robust browser-based applications. Over the years, it was adopted as a language for creating server-side code as well. Developers are now using JavaScript for creating desktop and mobile applications too, and even for programming microcontrollers.

In short, JavaScript has become ubiquitous, and almost every developer would benefit from knowing it.

Numerous frameworks, SDKs, and APIs are built upon JavaScript. Services such as Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Framework offer JavaScript implementations, allowing you to incorporate artificial intelligence into your applications.

If you decided to take advantage of these tools, you might be a little confused about where to start. Learning a new SDK or framework can be challenging enough; trying to learn a new language at the same time only makes things even harder.

Fortunately, we’ve got you covered! Building upon the Python for Beginners series, we’re excited to share a free 51-part video course with you.

Beginner’s Series: Introduction to JavaScript will help you gain the necessary background you’ll need to get started on your journey with JavaScript.  to get started on your journey with JavaScript.

Throughout the course, we will help you set up your development environment with Visual Studio Code and installing Node.js as a JavaScript runtime, then we’ll then dive straight into creating a “Hello World” app. We’ll look at the syntax of JavaScript and dig into progressively more advanced topics including objects and programming with async functions. Lastly, we’ll explore the JavaScript ecosystem and the vast amount of packages and libraries available on NPM. To best enjoy the course, we do assume you have some experience with a programming language, albeit we assume no prior knowledge of JavaScript.

At the beginning of the course, we’ll also introduce (some of) the many places you can run JavaScript, including the browser and on the server with Node.js. While the focus of the course will be primarily on using Node.js as the environment for execution, most of the videos will present concepts and syntax which work in the browser as well.

Questions or feedback? Let us know in the comments below.

Christopher Harrison

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft

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