Part of me thought about skipping the first few exercises because they seemed redundant. To be fair, most of it was. There were also a number of long-ish videos (7 minutes) that talked about the utility of JS that was clearly geared toward people looking to become professional programmers, rather than a hobbyist like myself. Outside of this, here are the cool/fun things I learned that differed slightly from my understanding of other languages. Most of this focuses on data types.
Data types, operators
There are seven data types in JS: strings, numbers, Boolean, null, undefined, BigInt, and symbol.
//DATA TYPES
//strings must be in single or double quotes
//numbers can be presented without modification
//Boolean has only two types, true and false
//Null is the absence of value
//Undefined, a variable that has not yet been assigned a variable
//BigInt is an extra-large box that can hold large numbers or groups of numbers.
//Symbol is like a box with the same label as other boxes but each has a different serial number.
//OPERATORS
//assignment operators and logical operators
//assignment operators (+, -, /, *) plus, minus, divide, multiply
//logical operators (&&, ||, !); check if two or more conditions are true, at least one is true, not
Much of this feels really familiar thanks to R and dplyr.
Specifics on numbers, strings, and booleans
/* <- I remembered that you can use this instead of double forward slashes for each line as long as you close it with *\
/*
NUMBERS
** = to the power of;
% = mod(ulous);
JS will follow order of operations unless you use parentheses
STRINGS
a collection of characters in quotes or double quotes
"Hello there!"
'It's a lovely day' doesn't work, but
"It's a lovely day" does because of different types of quotes
BOOLEAN (tests)
(==), equals;
(===), value AND type;
100 == "100", TRUE because values are the same even though type is not
100 === "100", FALSE because value is not the same as type
(!=), does not equal
*\
When I was going through BOOLEANs I was trying to brainstorm where you might want to use the triple equals sign. Maybe in a password manager where the pw must include characters and numbers.
Thoughts so far
I'm a little more than halfway through Module 1. So far so good. I'm looking forward to doing some of the assessments that are coming up next.
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