Writing Computer Code

Chris Minnick and Eva Holland are experienced web developers, tech trainers, and coauthors of JavaScript For Kids For Dummies. Together they founded WatzThis?, a company focused on training and course development.

• Introduction 1About This Book 1About You 2About The Icons 3The First Step 4Project 1: Becoming a Programmer 5What Is Programming? 5How can you talk to computers? 10What languages will you learn? 14Gathering Your Tools 18Getting your browser ready 18Working with JSFiddle 19Sharing Your Fiddle 27Summary 28Project 2: Gathering the Parts to Build Your Robot 2 9Saying What You Mean 30Making a statement 31Following the rules 33Giving and Receiving Data 34Knowing Your Operands and@Operators 39Introducing the Super-Calculator 40Forking the Super-Calculator 41Using the Super-Calculator 42Super-calculating with text 44Summary 47Project 3: Building Your Robot’s Body 48Writing HTML 48Seeing what text looks like without HTML 49Using HTML: It's all about the tags 50Nesting HTML tags 52Writing your first HTML document 54Knowing your HTML elements 56Introducing Douglas the Robot 58Changing HTML Using JavaScript 4Summary 66Project 4: Giving Your Robot Style 67Giving Douglas Style 68Getting the Basics of CSS 69CSS selectors 70CSS declarations 74CSS properties 76Colorizing Douglas 78Using CSS colors 78Changing colors 81Customizing Your Own Robot 84Summary 85Project 5: Animating Your Robot 87Changing CSS with JavaScript 87Modifying Douglas with JavaScript 89Experimenting with Douglas 92Making Douglas Dance 94Creating Animations with JavaScript 97Animating another element 100Using a second animation function 100Summary 104Project 6: Creating a JavaScript Word Game 105Creating a Variable Story 105Creating the Word Replacement Game 106Writing the HTML 108Styling the Word Game 111Writing the JavaScript Code 114Finishing the Program 117