Needs more Doc Emmett Brown.

That'll teach me to F5 before posting.

That depends who you're racing.

Given that this alleges to be a beta version and according to its own EULA:

THIS IS PRE-RELEASE, TIME-LIMITED SOFTWARE MEANT FOR EVALUATION AND DEVELOPMENT PURPOSES ONLY. THIS SOFTWARE SHOULD NOT BE USED IN A COMMERCIAL OPERATING ENVIRONMENT OR WITH IMPORTANT DATA.

why do Apple insist on removing any existing Safari 3 install when installing?

If we are supposed to evaluate and develop, then surely it would be prudent to allow a stable version to also be installed alongside for mission-critical usage.

Surely it's a TERRIBLE idea for non-stable, evaluation software to disallow the use of an alternative stable version?

Not strictly a maths book, but it's probably the first book I read that got me to REALLY think about things. Onvolves a lot of interesting ideas from other fields (Physics, Computing, Psychology, Physiology and many more) as well.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Emperors-New-Mind-Concerning-Computers/dp/0192861980/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234137007&sr=1-1

I opened this post expecting every second person to be recommending Simon Singh's 'Fermat's Last Theorem'. I never met an UG mathmetician at my college (at a moderately well-known collegiate university) that hadn't read it at some point before admissions interviews.

I am shocked to see it not mentioned even once.

Maybe it's just me who RTFA, but I'm not sure that the "scientists" at Loch Lomond Sea Life Centre are necessairly qualified to conduct human research. This isn't a university that's conducting this "research", it's an aquarium, and not one that receieves any tax *pounds* at that.

Another point worth making is that if you are purely interested in learning JS, as opposed to simply getting a job done, there's a lot to be said for taking the functionality you use most often from 3rd party libraries (and in some cases, the missing functionality you wish was in your favourite library) and attempting to write your own.

I was forced into doing this a year or so ago by a client who refused to use any code that we couldn't fully support, and didn't own the IP of (they're a major financial institution, so there was some logic behind this stance, but they never grasped why it didn't need to apply to JS).

As a result I've now got a stable library which is 1/4-1/3 the size of jQuery or Prototype and will allow me to accomplish 99% of what I do on a day-to-day basis quickly, easily, and is stable x-browser.

I appreciate this isn't for everyone, and it's taken a year of near continual work to get to this stage, and there's still a lot of ongoing work.

Before anyone asks, the original version of my home-rolled library is not mine to distirbute, but I am taking some of the things I've learned and working on my own version as and when I find time/motivation which I may well release into the wild if it ever gets mature enough - http://in.tellig.net/2008/11/21/elmojs-and-etherpad/.

jQuery is probably good starting point if you want to be able to do simple things very quickly and easily. If you are interested in actually learning the language itself as opposed to just how to do things in one particular library then I'd also recommend looking at Prototype. Prototype reveals a little more of the native DOM than perhaps jQuery allows so IM(NS)HO is a better primer for someone looking to grasp the fundamentals of the language, whereas jQuery is probably the best for actually "getting stuff done". I also cant recommend John Resig's book Pro Javascript Techniques enough, although it may be pitched slightly high for a beginner. Reading it seriously changed the way I thought about JS (and subsequently my entire career/life/destiny) so if you're an enthusiastic amateur looking to progress then I think it's perfect.

Have you tried disabling cache using the web developer toolbar?