JavaScript: The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan is a great book! When I began reading this book I was convinced that (like many technical books) the first couple chapters would contain the important stuff and the content would slowly digress into page filler, fluff, and the book would become just another monitor stand. But not this book! After finishing the formal chapters I started reading the references - YES, this book is so good I'm reading the references! Flanagan has raised the bar for all JavaScript books - this book is in its 5th edition, and reviewed by some of the greats in the Web Development / JavaScript world (Douglas Crockford, Peter-Paul Koch).

I often think of JavaScript as the assembly language of the internet - most of the current-generation web frameworks make heavy use of JavaScript, CSS, and AJAX. If you really want to understand how ASP.NET or Ruby on Rails really works, how AJAX works, how JavaScript libraries work. If you want to really understand how to push the web browser envelope, and how to really innovate, then this book is a required read. JavaScript (and other functional programming languages) present a different programming model. Once you grock the fundamentals of JavaScript you'll never be able to look at classical languages (Java, C++, C#, ...) with a straight face again. I highly recommend this book to ANY web developer from ANY web framework camp.

This book is now in my Recommended Reading section. View my review on Amazon.