"JavaScript: The Good Parts" : The Good Parts:

1) Explaining the language syntax and structure.

2) Exposing all the little gotchas in the language.

"JavaScript: The Good Parts" : The Bad Parts:

It's too opinionated. Crockford has this style of presenting multiple ways of doing things, e.g. inheritance, culminating with his cute little way.

I'm not surprised a Java developer would love the book, because Crockford evaluates the merit of the strategies he presents by how close they come to implementing Java in JavaScript.

I've written my first large JS application over the past year and by far, my biggest struggles have been with performance, documentation, and catching nasty syntax errors. Private variables and information hiding? Not so much.

What's helped me the most is dumping all of Crockford's opinionated suggestions, and using the Closure Compiler. I get great static code checking for errors, and their JSDocs are top notch. JSDoc won't work with functional inheritance, only prototypical, but the tradeoff is totally worth it, because I get beautifully formatted HTML docs for all my code.

Re: closure compiler, not to mention dead code removal, type checking, conditional compilation via @define, function inlining, and a configurable flood of useful warning and error messages. I, too, dumped Crockford for Closure on a large web app and have been thrilled.