Gain insights into JavaScript fundamentals. Delve into variables, operators, functions, arrays, objects, and loops. Discover essential concepts to advance further in your coding journey with this beginner-friendly course.

This is an introduction to JavaScript for the complete beginner. It'll provide the fundamentals of the language. Topics include variables, operators, functions, arrays, objects, and loops. After this course, you should be ready to further your learning through advanced courses or other resources.

There is NO installation required for this course. Code can be viewed and run directly from the lessons.

This course has been created by Arnav Aggarwal, a full-stack engineer. Arnav has attended a coding boot camp and has taught at another one. He has extensive experience understanding how people learn to code. In under a month, Arnav's published articles on JavaScript concepts have received over 50,000 views and have been featured on Medium.com and code mentor.io due to their value.

After this course, check out the next one in the series.

Step Up Your JS: A Comprehensive Guide to Intermediate JavaScript

https://goo.gl/GjM8Mu

Introduction to JavaScript: First Steps

# "Truthy" and "Falsey"

If-statements don't work only with booleans. We can use any variable type inside the if-statement parentheses.

If we don't use `true` or `false` variables, JavaScript will forcibly coerce whatever we put inside the parentheses to `true` or `false`. It'll then decide whether to run the code or not.

**A value that coerces to `true` is referred to as "truthy". One that coerces to `false` is "falsey".**

So how do we determine what a value will coerce to? It's actually pretty simple. The following values are "falsey" and will coerce to `false`, meaning the code in the if-statement won't run.

- `false`
- `null`
- `undefined`
- `''` or `""` (empty, 0-length string)
- `0` (the number zero)
- `NaN`

**All other values are truthy**. This means that all numbers except 0 and `NaN` and all strings that are not empty are truthy.

Try setting `itemToTest` equal to different values in the code block below. Test them out.

Learn what truthy and falsey mean in JavaScript. Learn how to make if-statements more powerful.

Introduction

Variables

Operators & if-statements

Functions

Arrays

Objects

Loops

Conclusion

if-statements, continued

“Truthy” and “Falsey”