JavaScript Libraries

You have spent a lot of time this semester learning the nitty-gritty of JavaScript for front-end web development. This is important, so that you can write code to perform interesting tasks, monitor security, interact with users, display updated information, or collect data. You can do any of these tasks with vanilla JS; that is, plain JavaScript as understood by browsers.

However, much of the code you have written this semester, as well as implementations of many of the specifics mentioned above have already been written by other developers. This is where libraries come in. It can be considered a waste of resources for developers to end up writing a lot of the same types of functions or tasks. Why should each developer write the same thing, or one developer have to write the same thing many times, in order to do the same thing across many web apps. The answer is; they shouldn’t. It is a waste of time that could be spent solving other problems and working on other code. Libraries are ways of collecting common functions or tasks that developers need into files that can be referenced and loaded for use.

There are many, (MANY,) libraries for JavaScript.

To read more about libraries, please visit the following links. (NOTE: the following can be found from the first link, or you can use these direct links.)

1. Khan Academy. “Using JS libraries in your webpage: What’s a JS Library?”
2. Khan Academy. “Using JS libraries in your webpage: Using a JS Library: Slideshow library”
3. Khan Academy. “Using JS libraries in your webpage: Where are JS libraries hosted?”
4. Khan Academy. “Using JS libraries in your webpage: The world of JS libraries”
5. Khan Academy. “Using JS libraries in your webpage: Which JS library should you use?”