A few things you should know before learning anything in javascript are, javascript is NOT java, they are completely different programming language. Javascript is great for making websites more dynamic, it is a very powerful language that can accomplish quite alot. The difference between javascript and languages like php, asp, perl, etc is that your javascript code will actually be run directly on the visitors computer, with the other languages, your server does all the work. This makes javascript great for many things that would normally add quite a load to your server. It is also much more responsive this way, since the code is run on the users computer, there is no need to reload pages constantly to add new information.
Javascript is able to work with any part of the HTML DOM (Document Object Model). You know, all those html tags like <div> and <img>, along with all their properties such as "src", "width", "height" and pretty much any other html tag or property you can think of. Javascript can also manipulate CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) directly on the fly. So you can think of the browser window as your canvas, the tags and their properties as your tools for displaying information, and javascript as a tool to manipulate that information when any event occurs (such as keyboard input, mouse movement, the time changing, etc.).
To program javascript, the only tool you will need is a text editor. Notepad will do just fine for your first few programs, but once you really get into it you may want to find a specialized editor for javascript, which will highlight the special javascript words and keep your code more readable. I personally use dreamweaver, but there are plenty of free alternatives out there if you do a google search. So continue on to Lesson 2 and get learning!
