JavaScript was originally invented by Netscape under the name "Livescript" but when Java became a fashionable programming language, they changed the name to JavaScript. It was first implemented into a browser in Netscape version 2.0, which was when Microsoft saw the usefulness of it and implemented their own version, JScript, which was first used in Internet Explorer 3.0.

Netscape was the first company to release the language definitions of JavaScript to the public, and agreed along with Microsoft and other companies to produce a "vendor-neutral" language that would be cross browser compatible. But, as with HTML the languages are not quite compatible and require tweaking to use in Internet Explorer and Netscape.

You do not need any special tools to write JavaScript, only a text editor. However, most error messages that you will receive from JavaScript will be referring to a line number, so a text editing tool with line numbers available like PFE or JavaScript Editor is a must. If you are using a WYSIWYG HTML editor, then you must check that it supports JavaScript as not all of them do.

Before you start, it's important that you know the basics of HTML, if you don't they read the HTML basic Tutorial.

There are several basic concepts that you will have to understand before beginning to program in JavaScript, these are:

Client-side - JavaScript that is executed on the user's machine
Server-side- JavaScript that is executed on the web server.

In these tutorials we will cover mainly client-side JavaScript, in Tutorial 2 we will cover the "document" command.