Chapter 1: Into Programming

Welcome to the You Don’t Know JS (YDKJS) series.

Up & Going is an introduction to several basic concepts of programming — of course we lean toward JavaScript (often abbreviated JS) specifically — and how to approach and understand the rest of the titles in this series. Especially if you’re just getting into programming and/or JavaScript, this book will briefly explore what you need to get up and going.

This book starts off explaining the basic principles of programming at a very high level. It’s mostly intended if you are starting YDKJS with little to no prior programming experience, and are looking to these books to help get you started along a path to understanding programming through the lens of JavaScript.

Chapter 1 should be approached as a quick overview of the things you’ll want to learn more about and practice to get into programming. There are also many other fantastic programming introduction resources that can help you dig into these topics further, and I encourage you to learn from them in addition to this chapter.

Once you feel comfortable with general programming basics, Chapter 2 will help guide you to a familiarity with JavaScript’s flavor of programming. Chapter 2 introduces what JavaScript is about, but again, it’s not a comprehensive guide — that’s what the rest of the YDKJS books are for!

If you’re already fairly comfortable with JavaScript, first check out Chapter 3 as a brief glimpse of what to expect from YDKJS, then jump right in!