Twenty-two years ago I was introduced to programming by a friend in middle school. I was working on a video project and my friend thought it would be cool to display scrolling credits at the end of the video.<\/p>\n
I thought to myself, “this guy is going way over the top, we don’t have time for that!” Then he told me he could write a program on his home computer to run the credits, and all we’d have to do is video tape the monitor.<\/p>\n
I was instantly intrigued at the idea. He wrote about a dozen lines of BASIC and showed me the code. Boom, I became an amateur programmer that very moment.<\/p>\n
For a long time though, the output of my little “scripts” was limited to the DOS console, my code was procedural and variable scoping wasn’t really an issue.<\/p>\n
When I think about young programmers starting out with JavaScript today, what a different experience. An understanding of your development environment, runtime environment, variable scoping and object-oriented development almost seem like prerequisites even at the most basic introductory level.<\/p>\n
When I was browsing Amazon yesterday, I came across this book.<\/p>\n