From the course: SharePoint Advanced: Enhancing Functionality with JavaScript

Why all the excitement?

From the course: SharePoint Advanced: Enhancing Functionality with JavaScript

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Why all the excitement?

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- [Instructor] I don't know about you, but I have done my best for years to avoid the whole issue of JavaScript in SharePoint. Now, don't get me wrong. If you've seen any of my other courses, you know that I'm far from a technophobe. I don't mind rolling up my sleeves and getting into advanced SharePoint functionality, even to the point of creating new XML files for themes or customizing CSS code. But JavaScript has always seemed, well, scary. What's worse is that when I tried to learn more about what JavaScript can do, I had a terrible time finding any information about JavaScript and SharePoint that didn't assume a very strong developer background. It was as if everyone was already expected to know about JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX, and so on. Lots of tech talk for experts, but more or less nothing for beginners. "Well, that's weird," I said to myself. "I wonder if everyone else is as confused "about this as I am." And as I started to talk to colleagues about this, it became clear to me that there's a pretty big knowledge gap, hence, this course. What I'm going to do is try to demystify JavaScript in SharePoint. I'm going to talk about the most frequent ways that it's used and give you examples of some of the things you can accomplish. Now, here's a disclaimer for you. I am most assuredly not a JavaScript expert, and I won't be spending very much time on code itself except to provide examples. I will give you all the code that I use in the exercise files so that you'll have that to use as a template if you want to play around with it later. But if you want to learn how to write JavaScript, once again, I'm going to refer you to JavaScript Essentials Training in the online course catalog. I will talk about some of the different components that work together and explain how and where you can get connected. But once again, it will be an introduction. And I'll give you places to go for more information at the appropriate times. My ultimate goal, provide you with some of the information that I wish I could have found myself.

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