I've been working on getting a better understanding of JavaScript for the last year or so. For a while now I've been doing mostly front end development to provide a nice user experience. This isn't to say I've been doing UX stuff, but connecting a series of JQuery statements to make something work.
Thinking I'd hit bottom on how much I could learn about JS on the job I was happy to find John Resig's Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja.
This is exactly the book I need for a series of technologies. Not the introductory book on the topic with a few advanced topics towards the end chapters. Secrets of the JS Ninja assumes you know how objects, variables, Ajax and control structures are used in JS and puts you to work with some of the deeper features of the language.
One example is the user of the functions call and apply to set the context of this to be whatever you pass via call/apply. Two days later I found myself happy for having read that chapter as I had to debug a 3rd party piece of code which used those functions. A series of calls and apply's would have left me scratching my head about how the data got set if I hadn't just read up on it.
If you need an advanced JS book try out Secrets of the JS Ninja.
