The JavaScript Session That FINALLY Went My Way! : Day 4

I thought I was going to fight roadblocks every day of the challenge. Thankfully, today's obstacles were the ones I wanted to battle.

Linux UI is getting easier by the day, to be honest. It's less distracting than Windows. Not just that, learning shortcuts for stuff like switching between tabs massively improved my workflow.

New Day, New Session

I started my session by reading about the keywords of JavaScript— which form its core. They're words that mean something to the language and are reserved to be used only for that special meaning. Keywords are divided into 8 major datatypes:

• Numbers

• Strings

• Conditionals

• Boolean

• Undefined

• Null

• BigInt

• Symbols

• Objects

Strings are text: yes, just text. Everything that you see written on a website is a part of a string. I explored strings in depth and then learnt the difference between single quotes ('), double quotes (") and backticks (`) that enclose them. They all provide almost the same function, but backticks stand out due to a key difference: you can embed strings within strings using them.

String methods came next. These are built-in functions that look at strings and make a new one with something different. For example— let b=a.toUpperCase() makes a new string "b" that spells the contents of "a" in upper case.

Then I brushed up on numbers: nothing much to learn about the numbers themselves, just a few special numbers (infinity, NaN (not-a-number)). I could be wrong, though, I'm just starting out.

After that, I moved on to comparisons and conditionals. Comparison Operators are basically used to compare two datatypes and produce a true/false result based on it. Whereas conditionals execute a whole block of code depending on whether a condition was met.

What I did and my key takeaways:

I spent the rest of my session using the keywords and functions I learnt to make simple programs and test them out. It wasn't pretty : half of the time, my codes resulted in syntax errors. Learning took a few times per function and that’s okay. I did know I was going to make a ton of errors. It's just part of the journey. JavaScript logic has started to feel intuitive. I was finally coding, not just configuring and that felt good.

JavaScript demands attention.

You might’ve noticed that my progress is moving at a snail’s pace. I'm thinking of adding more time to my JavaScript sessions, 2 hours pass too quick.

Let's see how tomorrow goes and I'll make up my mind.