In the last tutorial, you learnt about the basics of numbers and strings in JavaScript. In this tutorial, you'll learn about variables, arrays and objects. Let's get started!

Variables

An important concept in programming is variables. Variables are used to store values.

The word 'variable' means 'can change'. It is used because variables can store many different types of values and can change their value many times.

A good analogy for the variable is a box. You can imagine the name of the variable as the label on the box, and the value of the variable as what's stored inside it.

Creating a variable in programming terms is called declaring a variable. Let's declare our first variable!

var x = "My first variable!";

var is shorthand for variable. You should read the above statement as "Assign the value "My first variable!" to a (new) variable named x."

So how do we know what value is actually stored in the variable? Simply write a console.log statement as usual:

type=codeblock|id=js_snippet_2_1|autocreate=javascript
var a = "My first variable!";
console.log(a);

Output:

My first variable!

Yippee! Your first variable! :)