Preface

I started my professional development career in 1999, when I first was paid a salary to be a developer. (I don’t count the few years before that when I was just having fun playing around on the Web.) In 1999 the Web was a scary place. HTML files were loaded down with font and table tags. CSS was just coming on the scene. JavaScript¹ was only a few years old, and a battlefield of various implementations existed across the major browsers. Sure, you could write some JavaScript to do something in one browser, but would it work in another browser? Probably not. Because of that, JavaScript got a bad name in the early 2000s.

In the middle of the 2000s two important things happened that helped improve JavaScript in the eyes of web developers. The first was AJAX.² AJAX enabled developers to make web pages more interactive, and faster, by making remote calls back to the server in the background without end users having to refresh their browsers.