They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

In this video, we'll take that first step by creating a simple JavaScript program.

I've organized this course so

you can follow along in Workspaces, Treehouse's web based text editor.

If you haven't used Workspaces before, here's a quick intro.

To get started with Workspaces, click the Launch Workspace button on this page.

When the Workspace window opens, you can type a new name or leave it as is.

Then, click Launch to open the workspace.

On the left side here are all of your files.

You can add new files to the workspace and open files that already exist.

When you click the Preview button here, a new browser window opens and

the index.html file in your workspace is displayed.

Keep this in mind,

the Preview button doesn't open the file you're currently working on in

the workspace, it always opens the index.html file in the top level folder.

If you haven't already, go ahead and launch the workspace on this page.

It has a few starter files.

Open the file's scripts.js by clicking its name in the file listing.

It's an empty file.

Let's start with a simple command.

Let's see what it does.

Save the file and click the Preview button in the workspace's window.

Well, it doesn't do too much.

It seems like something's missing.

Let's try adding a message.

Save the file, and preview it again.

Now, there's a message.

Cool!

Alert is a command that's built into the browser.

It opens a dialogue box and displays a message.

What we've typed here is called a JavaScript statement.

A statement is like a sentence.

And just as sentences end in a period, JavaScript statements end in a semicolon.

You write programs by typing multiple statements.

Just like you write a paragraph, by writing multiple sentences.

Let's go back to our program and add another statement or

line of programming code.

Here's a new command, document.write.

The word document represents the current web page, and

write is a command that writes a message to the page.

I'll talk more about this command and why there's a dot between document and

write later on in this course.

The important thing to understand now is that we can use JavaScript to

write directly into a web page.

Let's provide a message to this command.

Save the file and preview it.

Now we have two different ways to send messages.

A dialog box, and writing directly to the webpage.

Let's add one last line of code.

So now we have three lines of code.

And if we save the file and preview it, you can see an alert.

Then when you close the alert,

a text message appears, followed by another alert.

There are two things to understand from this.

First, a program is a set of statements that run one after the other.

Second, one statement needs to be complete before the next statement runs.

So the document.write command which prints to the page can't do

it's thing until the first alert command,

which includes the user closing that dialogue box, finishes.

All right, you've started your JavaScript programming adventure.

You've written your first program and

learned two new commands, alert and document.write.

In the next video, you'll learn where and how to add JavaScript to webpages