Introduction to Array

Let's dive into the fascinating world of arrays in JavaScript! 

Arrays are a fundamental data structure in JavaScript, used to store ordered collections of elements.

An array is a special variable, which can hold more than one value.

Why use arrays?

If you have a list of items (such as student names), storing the student names in a single variables could be done like this :- 

let student_1 = "John";
let student_2 = "Smith";
let student_3 = "Jack";

However, what if you want to loop through the students and find a specific one? And what if you had not 3 students, but 300?

The solution is an array!

Creating an Array

Using an array literal is the easiest way to create a JavaScript Array.

Syntax:

const array_name = [item1, item2, item3, ...]; 

Above, an array named "array_name" has been created.

Accessing Array Elements

An array can hold many values under a single name, and you can access the values by referring to an index number. As illustrated in the diagram below:

An array with 6 elements is created. The first element 'A' is at index [0], the second element 'B' is at index [1], and so on.

To access any element, we can use this indexing with the array name.

let element = array_name[index];

For example:

const charArray = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F'];
let charElement = charArray[2];
console.log(charElement);    // output: 'C'

Here, you are accessing the second element 'C' using its index.

Note: Array indexes start at 0.

[0] represents the first element. [1] represents the second element and so forth.