Sams Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours

Tools for Scripting

Unlike many programming languages, you won't need any special software to create JavaScript scripts. In fact, you probably already have everything you need.

Text Editors

The first tool you'll need to work with JavaScript is a text editor. JavaScript scripts are stored in simple text files, usually as part of HTML documents. Any editor that can store ASCII text files will work.

You can choose from a wide range of editors, from simple text editors to word processors. If you don't have a favorite editor already, a simple editor is most likely included with your computer. For Windows computers, the Notepad accessory will work just fine.

A variety of dedicated HTML editors is also available and will work with JavaScript. In fact, many include features specifically for JavaScriptfor example, color-coding the various JavaScript statements to indicate their purposes, or even creating simple scripts automatically.

For Windows computers, here are a few recommended editors:

• HomeSite An excellent HTML editor that includes JavaScript support. HomeSite is included as part of Adobe Dreamweaver and is also available separately.

• Microsoft FrontPage 2003 Microsoft's visual HTML editor. The Script Builder component enables you to easily create simple scripts.

• TextPad A powerful text editor that includes a number of features missing from Notepad. TextPad's view of a JavaScript document is shown in Figure 2.1.

  Figure 2.1. A text editor (TextPad) with a JavaScript document.

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The following editors are available for both Windows and Macintosh:

• Adobe Dreamweaver A visually oriented editor that works with HTML, JavaScript, and Macromedia's Flash plug-in.

• Adobe GoLive A visual and HTML editor that also includes features for designing and organizing the structure of large sites.

Additionally for the Macintosh, BBEdit, TextWrangler, and Alpha are good HTML editors that you can use to create web pages and scripts.

Browsers

You'll need two other things to work with JavaScript: a web browser and a computer to run it on. Because this book covers new features introduced up to JavaScript 1.5 and the latest W3C DOM, I recommend that you use the latest version of Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer. See the Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.com) or Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com) website to download a copy.

At a minimum, you should have Firefox 1.0, Netscape 7.0, or Internet Explorer 6.0 or later. Although Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 4 will run many of the scripts in this book, they don't support a lot of the latest features you'll learn about.

You can choose whichever browser you like for your web browsing, but for developing JavaScript you should have more than one browserat a minimum, Firefox and Internet Explorer. This will allow you to test your scripts in the common browsers users will employ on your site.