Customer Rating: 
Summary: At Long Last, A Serious Javascript Book
Comment: For about as long as it's been about, Javascript has endured a plague of poorly written and presented books. "A Million and One Ways to Write a Rollover." Many books will treat writing a function as an advanced move. It is left as an exercise for the reader how to manage ones code when the scale surpasses the trivial.
Douglas Crockford, who works at Yahoo, is unable to leave these questions in the realm of the intellectual, and he is in growing company. The era of large Javascript applications is upon us. By large, I mean applications that are mostly javascript, rather than HTML documents with a splash of code. This is more than mere AJAX. This is true application development, and with the scale must come application scale rigor.
It is to the problems of serious application developers that Crockford addresses the book. This is *not* an introductory book. It is generally assumed that the reader knows what the building blocks are.
Instead, Crockford focuses on issues such as organization, error avoidance, and writing code touched by many developers.
More importantly, Crockford expresses opinions. Technology as a field is never short on opinion, but technology books are a wasteland. Good luck finding a volume that spends much time at all criticizing its subject matter. Crockford pulls no punches. If he doesn't care for a given design decision, he says as much. It is, in a word, refreshing. Would that more books offered such candor.
Even if you disagree with Crockford's answers, the exercise of working through his arguments will teach you to ask better questions.
In exchange, you will learn about some of the more powerful but under-used aspects of Javascript, such as closures and first class functions. Furthermore, Crockford's detailed descriptions will give you clearer insight into exactly how the language really works.
In sum, Javascript: The Good Parts is the sort of book that can move you to the next level in your javascript development. Thank the gods the age of platonic, useless JS books is behind us.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not a beginner's book, but
Comment: This is not a book for non-programmers or people new to the field. It is a very dense yet approachable review of the very succinct and elegant language inside of what commonly is thought of as JavaScript. Highly recommended if you have previously thought negative things about JavaScript and want to improve you JavaScript skills, especially for those who favor elegant code.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent Resource for JavaScript
Comment: I'll keep this short and sweet (like the book). This book distills the JavaScript language down to the bare essentials that a programmer will need to write clean, powerful code. It even tells you what to avoid along the way. Douglas Crockford takes a veritable pig of a language and turns it into delicious ham, bacon, and chops.
For someone serious about JavaScript, there are two books to own. JavaScript: The Definitive Guide to learn the language and its syntax (in minute detail), and this book, to learn how to use the language well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Great JavaScript Book for Everybody
Comment: This is the first book by Douglas Crockford a Senior Software Archtitect at Yahoo. He is widely known as one of the most knowledgeable on JavaScript apart from the creater of JavaScript (Brendan Eich). Douglas Crockford is the creator of JSON and has written many articles and presentations on JavaScript-related topics in web development.
His book JavaScript: the Good Parts, is a short (145 pages including Appendix) but is very useful for the person who wants to expand his/her JavaScript skills and knowledge. It reviews the basics of the language in the first two chapters and then focus on intermediate and advanced topics such as objects, inheritance, arrays, and methods.
The appendix categorizes the "bad" parts of JavaScript that are not good programming syntax and should be avoided such as global variables, scope, eval function, with statement, undefined variables and so forth.
I really like how Douglas Crockford gives you everything you need in this book that is relevant to how modern developers using JavaScript program and helping you understand it easily and quickly. No long-winded explanations or extra "filler" just to make the book longer. He is right to the point and explains it in a coherent, understandable way no matter what your "technical" level is.
This is a very useful book for the client-side developer who wants either a great reference book or somebody who wants to take their skills to the next level using JavaScript.
A must buy!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: some value - because it's cheap
Comment: it's amazing that many great people don't know how to teach...somebody who loves this language so much to write so little and not explaining and providing examples......
The same thing you could find online.....
Don't take me wrong, you will learn a thing or two, but that's not the point.
So called diagrams or flow, whatever they are, they are totally useless.
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