What is the best JavaScript book?

[multimediocrity]

What is the best book for learning JavaScript? I already know it, but I'm sure there are plenty of new features and things that I skipped over that would be good to know. What are the best guides out there?

[mitya]

I have David Flannagan's Javascript: The Definitive Guide (version 5, O'Reilley). It's not for the beginner and can be pretty (and often needlessly) weighty, but it's an excellent cover-all resource for intermediate-advanced JS developers.

[multimediocrity]

Definitive guide is good. I like the Visual Quickstart guides as well. However, I would like to know more about the 'practical' side of JavaScript. Do you know of any books which teach strategies and how to build common applications?

[mitya]

Many moons ago I learned PHP with a Visual Quickstart Guide and I thought about getting the VQG JS book too, but it came out quite badly in Amazon reviews, hence I opted for Flannagan's effort.

While it's weighty, it has a lot of examples in and has a consistent emphasis on providing reusable blocks of utility code - good for applications. So for example he provides a good event registration tool which deals with all the tough event issues such as cross-browser differences and propagation. There are similar utility examples for other topics including HTTP (Ajax), DOM scripting and more.

I've not used any other JS books so someone else will have to chip in with other recommendations.

[rnd me]

I thought that "the book" of javascript was helpful in nailing down looses ends in my understanding of the language:

http://www.ecma-international.org/pu...s/Ecma-262.htm


while it's not the best tool for beginners to learn from, it is the final say of all things javascript for those who speak it.
The OED of JS if you will.

If nothing else, it provides comprehensive native method documentation, and explains what "this", "prototoype", and "valueOf" really do...

Also, the W3's DOM specs are pretty explicit at explaining the "other half" of in-browser programming.