JavaScript is becoming an increasingly, and probably acceleratingly, important part of web development. Yet a lot of JavaScript knowledge is still confined to Googling “jQuery [thing I want to do]”. I’ll cover the prerequisite ideas to understand JavaScript fundamentals, the language’s idiosyncrasies, and what the snippets you copy/paste as *actually* doing. I’ll also talk about some of the newer developments in the language, like CoffeeScript and Node.js.