I bought the MEAP a long time ago (allows you to read chapters as they are released...before edit), and I've casually read along. At the time, JS was not a strong language for me; I've put in the effort to reverse that. The main approach (which I liked): a) explain a topic in text b) illustrate with code c) test code => QED. If you're novice/intermediate with the language, I think it may help explain some of the trickier things. My main critique was that I did find some of the text overly verbose. My favorite book is still Stoyan Stefanov's http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Patterns-Stoyan-Stefanov/dp... and I've read nearly all of them at this point.