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Getting Started

This book is a reference manual for the JavaScript language, including objects in the core language and both client-side and server-side extensions. JavaScript is Netscape's cross-platform, object-based scripting language for client and server applications.

Sections:

What You Should Already Know

This book assumes you have this basic background:

Where to Find JavaScript Information

Because JavaScript can be approached on several levels, its documentation has been split across several books to facilitate your introduction. The suite of online JavaScript books includes:

In addition, other Netscape books discuss certain aspects of JavaScript particularly relevant to their topic area.

The Netscape web site contains much information that can be useful when you're creating JavaScript applications. Some URLs of particular interest include:

Document Conventions

Occasionally this book tells you where to find things in the user interface of Netscape Navigator. In these cases, the book describes the user interface in Navigator 4.0. This interface may be different in earlier versions of the browser.

JavaScript applications run on many operating systems; the information here applies to all versions. File and directory paths are given in Windows format (with backslashes separating directory names). For Unix versions, the directory paths are the same, except that you use slashes instead of backslashes to separate directories.

This book uses uniform resource locators (URLs) of the form

http://server.domain/path/file.html
In these URLs, server represents the name of the server on which you run your application, such as research1 or www; domain represents your Internet domain name, such as netscape.com or uiuc.edu; path represents the directory structure on the server; and file.html represents an individual filename. In general, items in italics in URLs are placeholders and items in normal monospace font are literals. If your server has Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) enabled, you would use https instead of http in the URL.

This book uses the following font conventions:


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Last Updated: 10/31/97 12:29:49


Copyright � 1997 Netscape Communications Corporation