Understand JavaScript's core inheritance model through prototypes.
JavaScript's inheritance model is fundamentally different from that of class-based languages like Java or C++. Instead of classes, JavaScript uses prototypes. Every JavaScript object has a private property which holds a link to another object called its prototype. That prototype object has a prototype of its own, and so on, until an object is reached with `null` as its prototype. This is known as the prototype chain. When you try to access a property on an object, the JavaScript engine first looks for the property on the object itself. If it doesn't find it, it looks at the object's prototype. If it's not there, it looks at the prototype's prototype, and so on, all the way up the chain until the property is found or the end of the chain is reached. This mechanism allows objects to inherit properties and methods from other objects. While ES6 introduced the `class` keyword, it is primarily syntactic sugar over this existing prototypal inheritance model. Understanding prototypes is crucial for a deep understanding of how objects and inheritance truly work in JavaScript, and it helps to debug issues related to property access and method resolution.