How to Calculate the Angle Between Two Points in Javascript

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I would post something that was both useful and nostalgic.  I haven’t had a need to do any form of trig since college, maybe even high school.  But for the hackathon last week, I was building an in-browser version of Missile Command that let you blow up the contents of the page.  To do this, I needed to animate missiles being fired and I need to know what the angle between the base and the target to rotate the missile sprite to look correctly.  So my first search yielded the following code snippet:

var angle = Math.atan2(y2 - y1, x2 - x1);

This seemed pretty simple and straightforward and to get the x2 and y2 values, I used the clientX and clientY values from the mouse click event and I used getBoundingClientRect() to get the top and left properties of the base which was a div element positioned at the bottom of the page.  So the final code to calculate the angle looked like this:

// e - mouse event
// base - div element
var baseRect = base.getBoundingCLientRect(),
    y2 = e.clientY,
    x2 = e.clientX,
    y1 = baseRect.top,
    x1 = baseRect.left + (baseRect.width/2),
    angle = Math.atan2(y2 - y1, x2 - x1);

So this made perfect sense and I was feeling pretty good (except for the flashbacks to high school and sitting in those uncomfortable chairs hoping the teacher wouldn’t notice I didn’t do my homework).  I then use the CSS Transform property to rotate my missile sprite like this:

transform:rotate(angle);
-ms-transform:rotate(angle); /* IE 9 */
-webkit-transform:rotate(angle); /* Opera, Chrome, and Safari */

And of course this is going to work on my first try, right? If you’ve read any of my other blog posts, you should know by now that nothing I do ever works on the first try.  So I click in the upper-right quadrant of the page and the missile rotates to point straight up.  At first, I think it’s because my sprite is actually pointing up and I need to offset the rotation.  Then I think there’s something wrong with how I was calculating the x and y coordinates.  So I debug all the values and they look okay.  Then I look at the calculated angle value and notice that it’s not even close to what it should be.  What could I have done wrong… that’s when I went back to the original equation and realized that angle was returned in radian and not degrees.  Well, first I had to remember what radians were and then I had to figure out how to convert it into degrees which turned out to be pretty simple:

var angleDegrees = angleRads * (180/Math.PI);

And then we go, now we have an angle in degrees that works.  Like I said at the beginning, this was a useful exercise in using something I learned in school and something that felt somewhat nostalgic.  Since I want to do more game development, I have a feeling this is only the beginning of my adventures of trying to remember trig basics.  Wish me luck…