I just finished the “Core Language” section of the Javascript Rhino Book. , which I got via a birthday gift certificate from my family. I am completely falling in love with this language. Sure, it’s got somewhat ugly C-like syntax, no builtin foreach loop for arrays, and some minor warts involving primitive types, but the whole “everything is an object, even a function” and “objects are essentially associative arrays, like Perl hashes and Python dictionaries” thing is very cool.
I don’t have any practical knowledge yet — just the core langauge, not the stuff you actually use to do cool stuff in browsers, but I really like the core language.
It seems like there’s a new wave of interesting javascript development taking place at the moment. This appeals to me quite a lot at the moment: http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/atom/JavascriptAtomApiClientUsingXmlHttpRequest
When Netscape still hoped to make a living selling web server software, their server software could ONLY talk to external databases with server side javascript. Crazy, man.
It’s just a dead cool language. I like the fact that if the Document object doesn’t have a method I wish it had, I can write it and assign it to Document.prototype at runtime.