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You've already learned three rules about naming a variable:
You can't enclose it in quotation marks.
The name can't be a number or start with a number.
It can't be any of JavaScript's keywords—the special words that act as programming instructions, like alert and var.
Here are the rest of the rules:
A variable name can't contain any spaces.
A variable name can contain only letters, numbers, dollar signs, and underscores.
Though a variable name can't be any of JavaScript's keywords, it can contain keywords.
For example, userAlert and myVar are legal.
Capital letters are fine, but be careful. Variable names are case sensitive. A rose is not a Rose. If you assign the string "Floribundas" to the variable rose, and then ask JavaScript for the value assigned to Rose, you'll come up empty.
I teach the camelCase naming convention. Why "camelCase"? Because there is a hump or two (or three) in the middle if the name is formed by more than one word. A camelCase name begins in lower case. If there's more than one word in the name, each subsequent word gets an initial cap, creating a hump. If you form a variable name with only one word, like response, there's no hump. It's a camel that's out of food. Please adopt the camelCase convention. It'll make your variable names more readable, and you'll be less likely to get variable names mixed up.
Examples:
userResponse
userResponseTime
userResponseTimeLimit
response
Pro Tip!
Pro Tip!
Make your variable names descriptive, so it's easier to figure out what your code means when you or someone else comes back to it three weeks or a year from now. Generally, userName is better than x, and faveBreed is better than favBrd, though the shorter names are perfectly legal. You do have to balance readability with conciseness, though.
bestSupportingActressInADramaOrComedy is a model of clarity, but may be too much for most of us to type or read. I'd shorten it.
Find the assignment for this chapter at:
THERE IS NO ASSIGNMENT FOR THIS CHAPTER
JUST DON'T WRITE VARIABLES LIKE A DUMDUM
Try out some of these problems to see how well you are doing so far
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