Book Image

JavaScript from Beginner to Professional

By : Laurence Lars Svekis, Maaike van Putten, Codestars By Rob Percival
4 (5)
Book Image

JavaScript from Beginner to Professional

4 (5)
By: Laurence Lars Svekis, Maaike van Putten, Codestars By Rob Percival

Overview of this book

This book demonstrates the capabilities of JavaScript for web application development by combining theoretical learning with code exercises and fun projects that you can challenge yourself with. The guiding principle of the book is to show how straightforward JavaScript techniques can be used to make web apps ranging from dynamic websites to simple browser-based games. JavaScript from Beginner to Professional focuses on key programming concepts and Document Object Model manipulations that are used to solve common problems in professional web applications. These include data validation, manipulating the appearance of web pages, working with asynchronous and concurrent code. The book uses project-based learning to provide context for the theoretical components in a series of code examples that can be used as modules of an application, such as input validators, games, and simple animations. This will be supplemented with a brief crash course on HTML and CSS to illustrate how JavaScript components fit into a complete web application. As you learn the concepts, you can try them in your own editor or browser console to get a solid understanding of how they work and what they do. By the end of this JavaScript book, you will feel confident writing core JavaScript code and be equipped to progress to more advanced libraries, frameworks, and environments such as React, Angular, and Node.js.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Returning function values

We are still missing a very important piece to make functions as useful as they are: the return value. Functions can give back a result when we specify a return value. The return value can be stored in a variable. We have done this already – remember prompt()?

let favoriteSubject = prompt("What is your favorite subject?");

We are storing the result of our prompt() function in the variable favoriteSubject, which in this case would be whatever the user specifies. Let's see what happens if we store the result of our addTwoNumbers() function and log that variable:

let result = addTwoNumbers(4, 5);
console.log(result);

You may or may not have guessed it—this logs the following:

9
undefined

The value 9 is written to the console because addTwoNumbers() contains a console.log() statement. The console.log(result) line outputs undefined, because nothing is inserted into the function to store the result, meaning...