Topics - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->In Lesson 10, we'll return to the world</v> of the command line and use Node.js to write three shells scripts of increasing sophistication. This use of JavaScript is currently less common than JavaScript in the browser, but it can be expected to grow as JavaScript, especially via Node and npm, continues to expand past its original web programming niche. These programs also serves as useful foundation for similar programs written in languages more traditionally thought of as scripting languages such as Pearl, Python, and Ruby. Perhaps surprisingly, we'll discover on route that the Document Object Model manipulation skills developed in Lesson 9 are still useful in shells scripts. Indeed, we'll extend our capability significantly in exactly the direction needed for the more advanced manipulations used in Lesson 11. The first program in this lesson shows how to use JavaScript to read and process the contents of a file from the file system. The next program then shows how to accomplish the similar feat of reading the contents of a URL. This has personal meaning for me, since I distinctly remember the first time I wrote an automated program to read and process text from the web, which at the time, seemed truly miraculous. Finally, we'll write a real life utility program adapted from one I once wrote for myself. It includes an introduction alluded to just a moment ago to DOM manipulation in a context outside of a web browser.