Notes

The console is a panel that displays important messages, like errors, for developers. Much of the work the computer does with our code is invisible to us by default. If we want to see things appear on our screen, we can print, or log, to our console directly.

In JavaScript, the console keyword refers to an object, a collection of data and actions, that we can use in our code. Keywords are words that are built into the JavaScript language, so the computer recognizes them and treats them specially.

One action, or method, that is built into the console object is the .log() method. When we write console.log() what we put inside the parentheses will get printed, or logged, to the console.

It’s going to be very useful for us to print values to the console, so we can see the work that we’re doing.

console.log(5);
This example logs 5 to the console. The semicolon denotes the end of the line, or statement. Although in JavaScript your code will usually run as intended without a semicolon, we recommend learning the habit of ending each statement with a semicolon so you never leave one out in the few instances when they are required.

You’ll see later on that we can use console.log() to print different kinds of data.