First Things First

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it. The first program to write is the same for all languages:

Print the words

hello, world
This is the big hurdle; to leap over it you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, load it, interpret it successfully, run it, and find out where your output went. With these mechanical details mastered, everything else is comparatively easy[2]

In JavaScript, the program to print "hello, world" is

Example 1.1. The Proverbial Beginning
console.log("hello, world");

We say that this is a program consisting of one statement. To find out what a statement is, let us continue with the next section.



[2] The quotes here are from [KR88] arguably the most famous of all programming books.