What Is a Function?

You can think of a function as a machine. A machine takes the raw materials you feed it and works with them to achieve a purpose or produce a product. A function accepts values from you, processes them, and then performs an action (printing to the browser, for example) or returns a new value, possibly both.

If you needed to bake a single cake, you would probably do it yourself. If you needed to bake thousands of cakes, you would probably build or acquire a cake-baking machine. Similarly, when deciding whether to create a function, the most important factor to consider is the extent to which it can save you from repetition.

A function, then, is a self-contained block of code that can be called by your scripts. When called, the function's code is executed. You can pass values to functions, which they then work with. When finished, a function can pass a value back to the calling code.