Weighing in at 140+ pages of content, JavaScript: The Good Parts [Douglas Crockford] cuts through the obscurities, pleasantries, and filler found in most technical books. Instead, this book dives straight into the heart of the JavaScript language. It presents the clearest comprehensive explanation of what makes JavaScript a great programming language that I've encountered to date. It nails the important concepts, like JavaScript's: object oriented nature, its classless (pseudoclassical) nature, and functional nature. While covering the fundamentals like JavaScript's: functions, lexical scoping, lambdas, prototypal inheritance, and functional inheritance.

This book's size makes it approachable for all audiences, its style is terse and concise. This book has the potential to do for JavaScript, what Richie's inspirational classic the C Programming Language did for the C language.

JavaScript is the programming language of the web (AJAX), and this book will guide you through the good parts of this often misunderstood language - while this book is an excellent reference, it is not intended to replace JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, you'll do best to have both these books on hand.

If you enjoyed (or are considering) this book then you may want to learn more of what Douglas Crockford has to say, check out his great JavaScript video series on the YUI Theater.

I highly recommend this book. View my review on Amazon.