- The thing I love most about JavaScript
is that it's very empowering.
If you know JavaScript,
you look at the web
in a different way.
You have the ability now to
write scripts, and write code
to interact with other different websites,
to mash up datasets, to
display data in a visual way
that you may not have had before
and to access certain data
from companies like, I don't
know, Stripe or Spotify,
that you might not have
access to as the user,
so there's a lot of power in there,
and it's really exciting.
So, what we're gonna do here
is I wanna show you a few
examples of what that might
look like, and my goal
for this course is that by
the end of this four weeks
the things that I'm showing
you now will look way less
intimidating, and not only
that, you will know, or you'll
have at least the sense of
confidence in how to start
with these services, 'cause
there's a lot out there to you
if you have, again, just
the fundamentals of knowing
how to use JavaScript, and read API's,
and all that kinda stuff.
The first service I'm gonna
show you is Optimizely.
So Optimizely allows you to
do A/B testing, that basically
allows you to test out different
versions of your home page,
for example, to see which
version people stay on the most,
or spend the most money on, or whatever,
those kind of things.
I'll put some links down below
if you don't know what A/B testing is.
There's a whole thing here,
and there's a really great
blog post on some A/B testing stuff.
But regardless, it's a
really important part,
and it's something that
we do here one month,
and to use this service, to
set it up as a salesperson
or a business owner, or a
developer, whoever you are,
you need to learn a little bit
of JavaScript, just to know
where to put in the snippet, for example,
and this is a really common
practice, that to use a lot
of these services you have to
copy in some JavaScript code.
And just kind of knowing the
super basics of where to find
that and where to put it
and maybe how to change some
parameters, can be really
useful and this will be really
easy to you by the end of
this course, really by the end
of the first maybe two weeks
we'll know how to do that.
And once you get into
Optimizely, it's really cool,
this is our Optimizely look
in here, because knowing
a little bit of JavaScript,
and the HTML in JavaScript,
allows you to edit this in
real-time, whereas most people
who are setting this up, if
they don't know how to code,
they kind of have to rely on
the interface, and you don't
get the full richness of
all the things you could do,
but JavaScript allows you,
HTML assists, then JavaScript
really allow you to edit
and go into each of these,
looking at the code.
So that's gonna be really
empowering to learn as well.
There's a lot of other great
services out there, some that
we will look at, we'll be
looking at the SoundCloud API
like I said, so if you wanna
grab music, this will all make
sense, we'll look at this
and some of the basic code
for getting started with SoundCloud.
We won't look at Stripe, but
Stripe is a really powerful one
to be aware of.
Stripe allows you to run some
code, and here you can see
Stripe JS, that's the JavaScript
implementation of Stripe
that will allow you to take
payments, so this is a really
cool one to be aware of.
Another one that's cool to
be aware of is Dark Sky,
they have an API that you
can access with JavaScript,
and you can get weather
data, so that's really cool.
And Google, Google has Google
Charts, and we will look
at this a little bit in the
fourth week, some of what Google
is working on, and Google
Charts allows you to use
JavaScript in their
framework there to take data
and visualize it, and you can
make all of these amazingly
beautiful interactive charts,
again, just knowing a little
bit of JavaScript.
So this is the future, this
is where you could be headed,
if you kind of stick on
the path, and that's really
the curriculum that I set up here.
This course is really about
doing things with JavaScript,
and doing what I really see as
being like, the bulk of what
developers are doing, using this language.
It's not about just
running math equations,
little games for fun and exercises,
I think all that stuff is good,
but I think a lot of people
stop learning JavaScript if
you've tried before doing that
stuff, because it's like,
why am I doing this?
And I wanna try to make this
as real-world as possible,
and with that said, we
will have some exercises
along the way, just to
kind of reinforce things,
and we'll figure it out.
So I'm excited, I hope all
of this looks really, really
exciting to you as well, and
if so, please stick around,
we're gonna do a lot more.
Alright, cool.