Question: I realise this is more of a general question, but I've read through similar answers on here but I can't find more of an overview. I'm new to callbacks and I'm trying to understand when they should be used.

The MDN web docs has this example;

```
function greeting(name) {
  alert('Hello ' + name);
}

function processUserInput(callback) {
  var name = prompt('Please enter your name.');
  callback(name);
}

processUserInput(greeting);

```

However I'm struggling to see how this is more beneficial than the following, where I'm not passing the greeting function as a parameter?

```
function greeting(name) {
  alert('Hello ' + name);
}

function processUserInput() {
  var name = prompt('Please enter your name.');
  greeting(name);
}

processUserInput();

```

Answer: 
As Javascript is async, sometimes it is difficult to handle response from non-blocking functions, for ex. if you are making an ajax call then it'll be executed asynchronously and results will be returned sometime later, by that time the main execution flow will pass the ajax code and starts executing following statements, in that case, its very difficult to catch the response to process further.

To handle those cases, callbacks comes into picture where you pass a function as the parameter to the ajax function and once the response is returned then call the callback by passing response data as a parameter to process further.

more info here <http://callbackhell.com/>
Callbacks can be extremely useful depending on the circumstances; for example, when working with JavaScript for Google Chrome browser extension development, a callback can be used for intercepring web requests once it has been setup.

The purpose of a callback in general is to have the callback routine executed upon a trigger - the trigger being an event of some kind. Usually, functionality follows an interface of chained APIs. By implementing callback support, you can redirect execution flow during a stage of an operation. Callbacks are especially useful to third-party developers when dealing with someone elses library depending on what they are trying to do. Think of them like a notification system.

Functions in general taking in parameters is useful for flexibility and maintenance. If you use different functions for different things, the functions can be simply re-used over and over again to provide different functionality - whilst still preventing bloating the source code with more-or-less the same code over and over again. At the same time, if you use functions to your own library and a bug shows up, you can simply patch it for the one function and then it will be solved.

In your example, your passing a callback routine to the function you're calling - the function you're calling will call the callback function and pass the correct parameters. This is flexible because it allows you to have a callback routine called for printing the contents of the variable, and another for calculating the length of the string passed in, or another for logging it somewhere, etc. It allows you to re-use the function you setup, and have a different function called with the correct parameters without re-making the original function.