JavaScript is the lifeblood of today's web. If you're going to learn one new language this year, make sure it's JavaScript.

Take a quick peek under the hood of the largest social network giant or the smallest bedroom startup, and what will you find? JavaScript. Pages and pages of JavaScript. Twitter, Facebook, and Google are all living, breathing JavaScript beings. It's the beating heart of the modern web!

Whether you're a back-end dev, front-end dev or designer, Jump Start JavaScript is the perfect primer to what may be the single most valuable language to know for the coming decade.

Ara Pehlivanian has been working on the Web since 1997. He now works for Nurun* as a Senior Client-side developer and Tech Lead working on projects for highly visible clients.

Don Nguyen's background is in building real time trading systems to analyze every single transaction for multiple markets spanning many years. Applications had to be fast, scalable and fault tolerant. These are exactly the same principles that need to be applied to modern day web applications.