JavaScript (“JS” for short) is a complete dynamic programming language that applies to an HTML document, and can provide dynamic interactivity in web sites. It was developed by Brendan Eich, co-founder of the Mozilla Project, Mozilla Foundation, and Mozilla Corporation.

JavaScript is incredibly versatile and beginner friendly. With a lot of experience, you can create games, animated 2D and 3D graphics, full scale database applications, and much more!

JavaScript itself is quite compact, but very flexible. Developers have written a large number of tools on top of the basic JavaScript language that unlock a huge number of additional features with very little effort. These include:

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) built into browsers that provide a variety of functionality, such as dynamic HTML creation and CSS style setting, video stream capture and manipulation, working with the user’s webcam, or generating 3D graphics and audio samples.

Third-party APIs allow developers to embed functionality into their sites from other developers, such as Twitter or Facebook.
You can also apply third-party frameworks and libraries to your HTML, allowing you to speed up the creation of websites and applications.

Since this article should only be a light introduction to JavaScript, we don’t intend to confuse you at this point by detailing the difference between the basic JavaScript language and the various tools listed above. You can explore all of this in detail later, in our JavaScript tutorial area and in the rest of MDN.