Safari Books Online is a digital library providing on-demand subscription access to thousands of learning resources.
- Create BookmarkCreate Bookmark
- Create Note or TagCreate Note or Tag
- DownloadDownload
- PrintPrint
III. Automation
“I . . . am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.” —Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
Prior to the year 2000, it was quite common for web developers to simply put their JavaScript files onto a web server in the same form as they had in source control, comments and all. If there were 10 files in source control, then there were also 10 files on the server. This type of mirroring, in which what you had locally and what you had on the server were identical, allowed for rapid changes. Additionally, this led to the “view source” era, where many web developers learned from going to a site and then viewing the source of the page along with its JavaScript.