Head First JavaScript (O'Reilly)

Couldn't say it better than Web Teacher so I won't bother: Head First JavaScript by Michael Morrison (O’Reilly, 2008) may not ring up five stars for everyone, but I like the Head First books so much so that it'll be going on my "strongly recommended" (short) list of core texts for "Web Technologies" next year.

JavaScript tips

You know how occasionally you read a tip and have a "wow" or "lighbulb" moment? Well, this collection of seven JS techniques from Dustin Diaz contained six such events for me (seriously: I read them over several days and had a "ding!" moment from all six code tips -- nice!)

@mediaAjax day 2.2: Building Interactive Prototypes with jQuery

In day 2, session 2 of @mediaAjax, John Resig gave an excellent demonstration of the elegance and simple syntax of jQuery, so much so that I'm inspired to use it to replace/augment my teaching of the DOM next year. He said his slides would be available and that the jQuery site has lots of documentation and tutorials, so I'll not reproduce the example code here; suffice it to say that jQuery looks good, useful and relevant to what my students need to know

Some of the extra details he gave: jQuery's Ajax support allows 3rd party JSON and uses something like eval or a dynamic <script>. jQuery supports a document "ready" event that triggers before "onload" to allow the JS to manipulate the DOM before the user sees it. jQuery is extensible and also interacts well with Firebug (as John demoed) and leverages the DOM so that it also works with XML documents loaded e.g. through Ajax.

He finished with a geek tease, showing a JavaScript port of a visualisation tool ("processing") running on <canvas> with super-cool, interactive graphics -- tease/cool!