Question

I always have difficulty grasping new concepts without seeing a real, basic, working example of what I am reading about. While I like the other explanation on stackoverflow, I’d really like to see a very basic example showing the difference between methods and functions in JavaScript that I can quickly run to learn more.

Answer 1

A method is just a function that is a property of an object. It’s not a different type of object in javascript, but rather method is just the descriptive name given to a function that is defined as a property of an object.

var myObj = {};
myObj.go = function() {alert("hi");}
myObj.go();

In this example, go is a method on the myObj object.

When a method is called as in the above example myObj.go(), then the value of the this pointer is set to the object that was involved in the invocation of the method (in this case myObj).

Since global functions are also implicitly properties on the window object, one could say that global functions are also methods on the window object, but you do not need the window designation in order to call them.

Local functions like inner() in this function are just functions and not methods as they are not attached to a particular object:

function main() {
    function inner() {
        alert("hi");
    }
    inner();
}