If you have a cursory understanding of JavaScript and it's syntax i highly recommend you check out some of Douglas Crockford's content: http://javascript.crockford.com/. He is the man who invented the JSON format (if you don't know what that is yet, don't worry, you'll come across it soon enough), and wrote an excellent tool called JSLint. He is an authority on the language.
His website has innumerable musings, explanations and interesting perspectives on all things JavaScript and he links to lots lots of videos of his various talks. His YUI Theatre videos are of particular interest as they are very comprehensive.
thank you so much for this. im going through the tuts now and loving it. you have any suggestions to where to educate myself in when I complete them? My ultimate goal is to be comfortable enough in js so that I can move to other languages like php and ruby. is that a good plan? What do you suggest learning after js?
Actually you don't need to know JS at all to learn PHP or Ruby. JS is mostly client-side language used to design interactions (although JS server side implementations are gaining traction now).
If JS syntax looks daunting to you, you can start at jquery, which is a js library, with much more elegant syntax.
Also, if you want to choose between Ruby or PHP. Go for Ruby, As weird as it may sound, learn some basics from other languages (PHP or Python), just because ruby is syntactically so different from other languages, that in my opinion makes ruby a bad starting language.
Most of the time, you can manage with Ruby and JS for server-side and client-side programming.
thank you dude... i went through all those learn.appendto.com JS tuts you reccomended and will now proceed to explore a bit of php as well as brush JS skills. thank you for everything man :)
* JavaScript. The Core: http://dmitrysoshnikov.com/ecmascript/javascript-the-core/
* Learning Advanced JavaScript: http://ejohn.org/apps/learn/
* JavaScript Garden: http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/