Theory book with little practical use

This book is not for practical people who have an applied purpose with JavaScript.

The major flaw with this book is that the examples used are completely useless for practicality: she uses boring things like moving text around the page when illustrating a concept rather using practical examples.

The best thing about this book are the numerous exercises, you literally start from page 6 with writing your first code example. Also, each chapter is not that long, around 15-20 pages.

As a non-IT person I found the text not too difficult to understand, but honestly, if you are completely new to any sort of programming (C#, VB, etc) you may have to re-read the paragraphs for it to sink in.

If you have a practical purpose in mind for learning JavaScript choose:
Simply JavaScript, it will save you time.
Also, if you know that you really struggle with reading technical texts in computing, use Simply JavaScript.

Pre-requisites for this book by Quigley are: basic HTML/XHTML and some CSS, either from a course or from a book such as Ian LLoyd's Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS. Obviously the more (X)HTML you know beforehand the better.

Also note that this book is abit old, in "software-years", and so some of the HTML methodology is outdated.
For example the book uses the tag to change the font attributes, something which has become deprecated, or "not recommended", by W3C.
But even with these outdated HTML methods I had no problems getting the coding to work, except for a few XHTML modifications here and there.