JavaScript for interactivity

- Everyone who works in the world of web development has to be comfortable with a certain amount of programming. For web development that means learning about JavaScript, the language responsible for managing interaction within a browser. It's not just front end developers, 50% of back end developers say they use some form of JavaScript daily. JavaScript interacts with the DOM handling events, loading and unloading media and creating, modifying and deleting elements in a page. Now this is a job for someone who appreciates creating and designing interactions with content. There have been several revisions to the language with a new version always on the horizon. Developers also have to worry about browser support issues because the language has matured rapidly and browsers don't always keep up with the latest improvements. To take care of this, most developers use something called a transpiler, which will convert code written in newer versions of JavaScript so that they work in older versions. Some developers write code in languages other than JavaScript that let them take advantage of new techniques and improvements that will eventually get folded back into JavaScript. JavaScript has also been implemented on the server side through something called Node.js, which is an implementation of the engine that runs in most browsers called Chrome V8. Now this allows you to use JavaScript in unexpected ways. For example, it gives you access to the file system. JavaScript has become a way of building sites, but also running applications that are going to make your life easier.