Tài liệu Activating Your chapter Pages with JavaScript

After you have mastered HTML, XHTML, and CSS, you might think “Phew!
Done. Now I’m ready to start building some cool Web sites!” So do give yourself
a pat on the back. You have made great progress. But depending on how you
want your site to evolve, you still have tons of additional things to learn. If you want
to have beautiful graphics or designs, you should explore some wonderful development
tools for artists, including Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Dreamweaver,
Flash, Fireworks, and many more. If you want to interface with backend database
systems, powerful scripting languages like PHP, and query languages like SQL,
you’ll be delving more into the programming side of things.
But this chapter isn’t about that. Indeed, any one of these topics is easily the subject
of another book—or two—and quite a bit more complex than I can cover in
this book. However, a critical additional level of sophistication for truly cool Web
sites is within your reach: JavaScript.
Imagine a reasonably simple scripting language that’s designed for Web page use,
and you’d be talking about the JavaScript language.
In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the language and then dig into five
nifty and informative ways that JavaScript can really expand and improve the interactivity
of a Web page. Finally, I wrap up with a brief look at some of the other
major scripting and development languages in common use.