No, thank you for writing such a wonderful piece. I just glanced over the first few chapters for the first time in over a year and was delighted. I remember stepping through that bit of assembly in chapter one with a pen and paper, then running the two js versions of the code in my browser. Some commenters have criticized the prose of the book; for me this really helped contextualize certain things that seasoned programmers take for granted. I would argue that this is more approachable for a beginner than Ritchie & Kernighan's book or SICP. But I suppose those aren't necessarily beginner books. For some reason, I like your book quite a lot more than a few introductory Python books I've read. Although Ruby is far more beautiful and useful to me than JS these days, I think it is a very bad idea to force object orientation onto beginners. It is better to let people ask for it when they need it, than to force it onto beginners (I can't help but think of Yegge's Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns). Accordingly, I think JS is a very suitable learning language because it provides a taste of object-oriented and functional programming, while maintaining a familiar C style syntax. Also, it's very powerful for event oriented programming, as demonstrated by node.js. I stopped programming in js because of frustration for lack of lisp-style macros, but perhaps clojurescript can fix this.
