Summary

In this chapter, we've discussed the important moments of JavaScript's history as applied to ML, starting from the launch of Google (https://www.google.com/) and finishing up at the end of 2017 with the release of Google's deeplearn.js library.

We’ve discussed some advantages to using JavaScript for machine learning, and also some of the challenges we’re facing, particularly in terms of the machine learning ecosystem.

We then took a tour of the most important recent developments in the JavaScript language, and had a brief introduction to ES6, the newest stable JavaScript language specification.

Finally, we set up an example development environment using Node.js, the Yarn package manager, Babel, and Browserify—tools that we will use throughout the rest of the book in our examples.

In the next chapter, we'll begin exploring and processing the data itself.