JavaScript is widely used for simple online applications.

This book presents HTML and JavaScript in a way that uniquely meets the needs of students in the sciences and engineering. It explains how to create simple client-side applications for scientific and engineering calculations. It includes many complete HTML/JavaScript examples with science/engineering applications to guide the reader progressively and comprehensively through the subject.

This book is specifically targeted at a technical audience-- but not one that is necessarily familiar with a programming language,-- and gives the reader a sufficient understanding of HTML and JavaScript to write their own online applications. The exposition emphasises basic programming principles in a modern Web-oriented environment, making it also highly suitable for an introductory programming course for non-computer science majors. It is also ideal for self-study. There is supplementary website for this book containing code examples and all graphics files.

From the reviews:

"This very short text book … is designed for well-motivated beginners who want to learn to program. It could provide an introduction to Web creation and programming for anyone … . The book contains several exercises for each chapter, all of them gathered together in a separate section at the end of the book. … overall, this is a really nice little book and, given its size, could be kept on the desk as a very basic reference to HTML and JavaScript." (J. Miller, ACM Computing Reviews, January, 2008)