I too found that to be pretty dubious advice. I try not to recommend people any books or tutorials unless I've seen it and it's clearly a good beginner's resource or I personally found it to be invaluable when I, myself, was starting out on a language. Crockford's book is the latter. It doesn't teach you the raw basics, sure, but there are many resources for that (I'd recommend Eloquent: http://eloquentjavascript.net/contents.html), and Javascript has fairly simple C-like syntax anyway, so it's not hard to pick up tangentially. The Good Parts gets you thinking about the language in a different way - that, plus the annotated spec (http://es5.github.com/) really sets you on the right road to mastery.