FOREWORD

The industrial revolution was built with steel, and the Internet revolution has been built with JavaScript. Forged and strengthened through constant iteration over the past 25 years, JavaScript's dominance in application development is now hard to question, but that wasn't always the case.

It took only ten days for Brendan Eich to make the first version of JavaScript. It felt fragile, but as history would have it, first impressions aren't everything. Today, every aspect of JavaScript—every detail you'll learn in this book—is the product of hours of debate. Not every decision is ideal and no programming language is perfect, but if you judge one by its ubiquity alone, JavaScript perhaps comes close. It is the only language you can deploy everywhere: servers, desktop browsers, mobile web browsers, and even native mobile applications.

JavaScript is now used by software engineers of all experience levels and backgrounds. It's used by those...