Too much going on here after "this"

Ron L, as a fellow treehouse-noob i will try an explanation. I know you were not asking a question but working through this explanation may have helped me reason things out. I have not gone through JavaScript Basics yet :x My notation purposefully differs from suggested Markdown notation.

Go back a smidge before the point where your head exploded, start at 9:00, pause at 9:16. When you type jim.greet(); into the browser window this may be being interpreted in these steps:

1) Jump to/locate var jim .
2) within var jim Jump to function greet . 3) Return to console the concatenation of string literal + this.name , so hold up... 4) Associate this.name with this 's container object var jim ; now jim.name = "Jim" = this.name 5) K, now Return to console the concatenation -> Hello I am Jim .

On towards head explosion! Run your video to 9:23. Storing another variable’s property and calling it with (); doesn’t work because this.name now searches for the container.name (step 4 above) only this time, this isn't contained in var jim. In that sense the variable, in our noob-code, is simply not defined. As he menions at 10:30, we have lost the context for the method. I can’t quite put it into words yet but I feel it is similar behaviour as named vs anonymous functions, and their varying impact and relationship with variable scopes.

Now the property .name seems to become associated with the global scope. This part is explained pretty well in the video. An attribute of the JavaScript language is that there is a global object, termed window. It happens that window.name(); has a default value of the string literal ’’ .

From 11:00 the whatIsThis is us going from a "writing program” mentality, stepping into “wtf? debug time” mentality. This is in an attempt to clarify the definition of window.name , for folk like me who assumed it to return as -> undefined simply because it is not literally in our noob-code. End lesson: this is to be used as a method, and not called as part of a function lacking sufficient context that it would Assign to the JS default global object.

If i'm mistaken please correct me so i can learn! these forums are a big reason why Treehouse is pretty wonderful for some peoples' style of learning.