Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2 ■ Data and Decisions
document.write(arrayToSort[3] + "" );
document.write(arrayToSort[4] + "" );
The items are arranged like this:
Apple
Banana
Cabbage
Lemon
Pear
If, however, you lower the case of one of the letters—the A of Apple, for example—then you’ll end up with a
very different result. The sorting is strictly mathematical—by the number of the character in the ASCII set, not like a
human being would sort the words.
If you want to change the order in which the sorted elements are displayed, you can use the reverse() method to
display the last one in the alphabet as the first element:
var arrayToSort = new Array( "Cabbage", "Lemon", "Apple", "Pear", "Banana" );
arrayToSort.sort( );
sortedArray.reverse( );
document.write(sortedArray[0] + "" );
document.write(sortedArray[1] + "" );
document.write(sortedArray[2] + "" );
document.write(sortedArray[3] + "" );
document.write(sortedArray[4] + "" );
The resulting list is now in reverse order:
Pear
Lemon
Cabbage
Banana
Apple
Making Decisions in JavaScript
Decision making is what gives programs their apparent intelligence. You can’t write a good program without it,
whether you’re creating a game, checking a password, giving the user a set of choices based on previous decisions he
has made, or something else.
Decisions are based on conditional statements, which are simply statements that evaluate to true or false. This is
where the primitive Boolean data type comes in useful. Loops are the other essential tool of decision making, enabling
you to loop through user input or an array, for example, and make decisions accordingly.
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