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Dynamic Hypertext Markup Lanuage
JavaScript can be seen as the fuel that drives HTML. Without JavaScript HTML is completely static, meaning no screen elements have any motion after a page is loaded into a browser window.
Leaving Flash aside, and please, do, better to learn how to code such effects yourself. Flash will only rote you brain and let you down after a while, it's great for adverts and simple games but as soon as you start dealing with real world systems involving changing data you'll realise it's very limited
Better still, check out this new ZXML, might be good, but primarily my point is learn JavaScript yourself, make all those screen elements do what you want them to rather than relying on tools.
Some people think they can make a living if they master flash, you won't.
Mastering DHTML requires mastering JavaScript and writing JavaScript can be quite hard at the inital stages, it takes a little time to get results, but once they come the effort seems well worth while.
Learning JavaScript is like learning many other programming languages, even thought it is script and not compiled, the activity itself is programming, don't let anyone tell you anything else.
So what do you need to learn?
Well the answer to that is you need to lean about writing functions.
You may recall, even if you did'nt study mathematics due to various reasons, that functions are things you pass values into and that do something with those values and then the function outputs or returns some value back to you.
What the function looks like, how you write them and what they do varies from language to language a bit, but not that much.
Before we start there's a couple of differences between the idea of what are in functions mathematics and in computer programming, as I say it does'nt matter if you did'nt do much mathematics at school because these points will still help you understand what functions are for programmers.
The first thing is that in computer programming certain functions don't return a value, they don't have to, they just do something and thats it.
The second thing is that in computer programming certain functions don't even have any values that are passed to them, they have no input values at all.
And yes before you ask some functions some functions have no input or no output values, they just get called and they do stuff!
A quick example of stuff might be moving a screen element to a new position, making a connection to a database, a whole raft of things, but we'll dive into the stuff that functions on the next page.