What fun would a web site be if there was no functionality to it? In this course, we are going to concentrate on learning the fundamentals of the Javascript language. A lot of even seasoned developers “tinker” with Javascript without really understanding how the language works. That leads to viewing the language as more of a nuisance instead of a powerful tool. That is why we are going to concentrate not only on the “how” but also on the “why”, so you are empowered by the Javascript language features, not confused by them. We’ll cover just about everything - from common language constructs and Javascript types to objects, functions, arrays, closures, and scope isolation.

In this course, we are going to take all those newly learned Javascript language skills and learn how to utilize them within the context of a web page. We’ll start by learning how to properly manipulate the web page components using the Javascript Document Object Model API. We will then move on to learning one of the most popular ways of serving up data to a web site - Ajax. We'll learn about the protocol that the language of the web speaks in (HTTP), how to set up and handle Ajax requests and responses, as well as how to process JSON data. We'll finish the course by connecting our restaurant web site from Course 3 (Coding the Static Restaurant Site) to a real backend service that will allow us to pull the data for the restaurant menu dynamically from the server without having to reload the entire page.