JavaScript Patterns. Is JavaScript the Future of Programming? JavaScript is the programming language that makes a website interactive.
Slideshows, advertising pop-ups and Google's autocomplete feature are all examples of JavaScript at work. It was first created by Brendan Eich at Netscape in 1995 — nicknamed Mocha during development, released in beta as LiveScript and ultimately named JavaScript in order to piggyback on the popularity of Java (another programming language) for marketing reasons. At first, developers didn't take JavaScript seriously, because it wasn't seen as a serious development language like Java, Ruby or Python, which are server-side languages. JavaScript was the frosting on the cake, only responsible for user experience. But the language continues to become more prolific, often recommended as a first language to learn for beginners. JavaScript. JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition
It is a fact that the book is being revised (a big +) for the 6th time and republished, so 100% David sure knows his subject.
However, to my dismay, I spotted several minor, but very obvious technical errors which I submitted to an already quite long errata at different points in time, none nevertheless appeared on the list as of the time of publishing this review. If to continue on a negative note, one other bother for me (not related to the book though) was a hardship experimenting with all the code due to lack of a JavaScript IDE with a good debugging support. The author advocates using FireBug in FireFox which is not my preferred choice of a browser at the moment, but I have not figured out how to debug (set breakpoints) the code from the book.