About this Book

Credits

• Sam Scott wrote the main text, some of which is adapted from an earlier work also by Sam Scott (JavaScript for Mohawk Students).
• John Popovici wrote and styled the Check Your Understanding boxes, wrote learning outcomes for each chapter, styled the Coding Practice, and Learning Outcomes boxes, and corrected typos in the text.
• Tram Nguyen made the cover illustration and contributed hand-drawn illustrations throughout the text.
• John and Tram’s work was supported by an Open Educational Resource Creation Grant from McMaster’s MacPherson Institute.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the students of COMPSCI 1XD3 (Winter 2025) at McMaster University who commented on the text, made suggestions, completed surveys, and pointed out typos. Some of these comments we acted on right away, others we put on the “to do” list for later. When we act on a student’s suggestion, we acknowledge it here.

• Thanks to Dina Sarhad and Nimesha Vilathgamuwa for making suggestions that resulted in important, substantial additions to the text.
• Thanks to Zayan Abdul-Karim, Ashaz Ahmad, Kanza Alam, Craig Ardiel, Jasmin Aryee, Samuel Dovbenyuk, Muniya Fallah, Abigail Fong, Trisha Ganeshratnam, Jonathan Gebretekle, Goshanraj Govindaraj, Natalia Guevara, David Ho, James Howson, Heeman Ijaz, Daniel Jarabek, Anita Jiang, Lucas Leung, Aryan Minhas, Adam Meddah, Tristan Pardo, Theodore Pham, Rafay Shahzad, Kia Torabian, Joyce Wang, Raymond Zhong, Arkel Ziko for pointing out typos or other minor issues.

Update Log

• 2025-04-22: Chapter 39 typo
• 2025-04-16: Chapter 20 and beyond: used the term “callback function”
• 2025-04-15: Learning Outcomes edited in all chapters. Incorporated new illustrations and diagrams in many chapters.
• 2025-04-10: Added Learning Outcomes and Check Your Understanding to section IV. Programming on the Server Side. Fixed typos in Chapters 35 to 41.
• 2025-04-07: Typos Chapters 20, 31, 34.
• 2025-04-01: Chapter 32 fixed typo.
• 2025-03-28: Chapter 35 added note about foreign key constraints to the coding practice.
• 2025-03-26: Chapters 34, 36, and 39, fixed typos.
• 2025-03-23: Chapters 3, 18, 20, 21, 36, and 39, fixed typos.
• 2025-03-20: Chapters 37, 24 and 4, fixed typos
• 2025-03-16: Chapter 42, fixed typos and added more explanation of Digital Certificates.
• 2025-03-15: Chapter 35, updated exercises (they can no longer be done using w3schools – thanks to Craig Ardiel for pointing this out).
• 2025-03-10: Chapter 40 updated diagrams and text for clarity. Chapter 34 typo fixed.
• 2025-03-06: Chapter 37 minor typos.
• 2025-02-24: Chapters 34 to 36 fixed typos and illustrations. Chapter 2 added illustration. Chapters 8 and 9 fixed typos.
• 2025-02-22: Renamed chapter overviews to learning outcomes. Chapter 8 updated learning outcomes and illustration. Fixed code snippet in chapter 36.
• 2025-02-21: Chapter overviews / learning outcomes added to sections I, II, and III.
• 2025-02-21: Chapters 40 to 42, 47, and 48 released. Minor updates to Chapters 44 to 46. Released chapter overviews with learning criteria for sections I, II, and III.
• 2025-02-20: Chapters 34 to 39 released. Fixed some inaccuracies about functions in chapter 33. New Chapter 41 added, so existing chapters from 41 onwards numbers increased by one. Chapter 43 (further reading) updated. Reference chapters for PHP and SQL added.
• 2025-02-18: New Chapter 39 added, so existing chapters from 39 onwards numbers increased by one.
• 2025-02-10: Released chapters 31 to 33.
• 2025-02-08: Minor updates to Chapter 25. Gotcha added to Chapter 16. Chapter 41 deleted, so reference chapter numbers reduced by one.
• 2025-02-05: Changed style of exercise boxes to Coding Practices. Typos fixed in Chapters 22, 23, 29.
• 2025-02-03: Chapter 21 changed color scheme of Hamburger example. Chapter 23 added Gotcha for drawin text. Chapter 24 fixed sound and vision todo box.
• 2025-02-01: Added interactive activities to section III. Programming on the Client Side.
• 2025-01-31: Minor content fixes in Chapters 16, 27, and 45.
• 2025-01-30: Added hints in the Chapter 11 Check your Understanding. Typos fixed in Chapter 19.
• 2025-01-29: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript reference chapters added. Typos fixed in Chapters 16, 20, 21.
• 2025-01-28: Chapter 24 fixed typo within a code example.
• 2025-01-27: Chapter 24 added reference to children and parentNode. Chapter 25 minor modification to exercise 1. Chapter 26 added new exercise 2 that follows from Chapter 25 exercise 1. Chapter 16 typo corrected.
• 2025-01-23: About This Book section created. Chapters 18 and 19 instructions changed for the helloworld example. Some chapters renamed to include language (JavaScript or PHP). Typos corrected in chapters 6, 8, 17, and 19.
• 2025-01-19: Added interactive activities to section I. Introduction to Web Apps and section II. The User Interface.