Stuff like this is soooooo frustrating.  Title says "essential" which, to me at least, indicates that there has been some filtering done by someone who is "in the know" about what to avoid vs on what to actually focus my learning time.  If I am wrong, please tell me, however I can hardly believe that 15 or so books on Javascript alone are "essential".  We all already know there are a million books on any topic in IT (so i guess in some ways you have filtered things from a million to around 15 or so :) ).  Thanks for reminding me again of how confusing it can be to actually choose what to study or where to start.  

I know everyone's situation is different, and to increase your exposure you as a blog author need to address as many people as possible.  But, IMHO, valuable content is what drives valuable traffic to one's site and I can hardly see the value in listing &gt;15 JS books as essential - that sort of indicates that you either have way too much time to read or are just as lost as the masses when it comes to choosing where to focus your time.  Unless you are an engineer on the YUI or JQuery or ExtJS teams (or something like that) I just can not see how reading that many books on one subject is valuable.

I'll continue whining in private now . . . :)