I'm going to second this. Crockford's book Javascript the good parts helped me a ton when getting up to speed in javascript. Ended up building a timecard java

I'm going to second this. Crockford's book Javascript the good parts helped me a ton when getting up to speed in javascript. Ended up building a timecard javascript application for mobile. I'll also recommend spending a little time with javascript before jumping into jQuery. learning how things are scoped is important.