It strikes me as a poor apology for the crap status of JS with a sprinkle of Douglas's debatable opinion rather than a useful primer in modern JS.
I can highly recommend books written by Nicholas Zakas.
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-JavaScript-Developers-Nic...
There is one shorter book that he wrote recently: https://leanpub.com/oopinjavascript
Speaking JavaScript by Axel Rauschmayer http://speakingjs.com/ is quite well suited for people coming from other languages rather than newbies to programming.
You may also want to check out Eloquent Javascript . http://eloquentjavascript.net/ . This is my goto book for Javascript
Javascript the Good Parts is for folks who already know Javascript. The concepts are more advanced than most beginners would encounter (currying, memoization etc).
I would recommend pointing them to this resource as well (19 pages and counting): http://wtfjs.com
"The Good Parts" is still a good one, but my recommendation these days now goes to Effective Javascript:
http://www.amazon.com/Effective-JavaScript-Specific-Software...
Outside of books, http://superherojs.com is another good resource to recommend.