Eloquent Javascript, 2nd Ed.: A Modern Introduction to Programming

This book is often lauded as a way to learn Javascript on your own. The types of people who recommend this book are inevitably experienced programmers who are out of touch with the mindset of a beginner. When you Google 'How did *you* learn Javascript?' this book is almost never mentioned, if at all. Pages are dedicated to ridiculous visuals for the exercises while the English remains nigh unreadable. It is not, as you might surmise, a result of technical jargon but rather a poor grasp of basic explanation in the English language; very technical exercises are not reduced to digestible chunks, but rather built upon using descriptions of real-world behavior that the program attempts to replicate. I cannot stress enough how unhelpful and unnecessary doing this is. Index references are also errant. When a concept is introduced it is ignored until around ten or so pages later at which time you've forgotten the purpose. It requires such a great amount of outside reading and flipping pages back and forth constantly that there is almost no point to the book being written. The contents of this book are similar to an elementary school teacher instructing students on basic mathematical operations and then asking them to build formulas out of them. I am okay at Javascript now and I only ever open this book out of a sick curiosity because I'm in disbelief at how bad it is. No offense to the author, but this book is simply not what it purports to be. It cannot figure out if it is a beginners guide, a reference book, or a documentation guide for experienced programmers looking to switch to Javascript. It does none of these things particularly well.