I just read the first couple of chapters and I find it a bit painful to be honest. I am not a CS grad and I don't write software as my primary job though I do write code to solve problems in my discipline. I have programmed C, Ruby and Obj-C a bit over the years and I find the pace of this book too slow and overly wordy. Yet, I think a beginner would find it quite hard going. Thinking back to when I was first learning, the first exercise (2.1) has too many traps to trip up an absolute beginner and you wouldn't write a true/false expression like that in practice. So, I'm not sure who the target audience is for this book. But, I'll have a read of it anyway because it's the nicest 'Learn Javascript' web resource I've seen so far. Picaxe is still probably the best introduction to a language I have read, gets right in there quickly with minimum fuss.
I agree. I appreciate good writing from programmers because at the very least, it helps pushback against the stereotype that programmers can't (or worse, shouldn't try) to write.
But long blocks of text are good for story-telling (well, narrative story-telling). The subject of programming and its syntax is more like that of a machine or process, and so eloquence in longform prose is not a strong teaching aid.
While the teaching and demonstration of programming needs better writers and speakers, that does not mean that it needs more straightforward prose. The lack of good prose can be a good thing, in cases where the density of text obscures the main, simple point (insert obligatory link to the work of Edward Tufte)
The first few chapters are very dry. When I recommend this to people I normally tell them to skim the first chapters and skip forward if they're getting bored. If you hold out to at least chapter 6, I'm sure you'll find something worthwhile.
I've never had a problem with a book moving too slowly -- after all, I can always skim or skip ahead. (This is far better than the reverse, where a book moves too quickly and is, as a result, impossible to follow. I've never actually encountered an example of the latter, but I'm sure they exist.)
