About if Statements

An if statement, otherwise known as a conditional, tell the program to check if something is true, then, based on that assessment, do something. Nearly every programming language has such structures. In javascript, they look like:

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if (something is true) {
  do this stuff!
}

the conditional goes in the parenthesis, then in the curly brackets, we put the stuff to do.

An example: we’ll check if I’m over 35 years old. If so, we’ll tell my program to call the function where I gain 10 pounds.

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if (myAge > 35) {
  gainWeight(10)
}

We can put a lot of things inside the conditional statement. These are all types of comparisons.

• > greater than
• < less than
• == equal to (yes, there are two equal signs there)
• != not equal to
• >= greater than or equal to
• <= less than or equal to