Via Leslie M. Orchard, I came across this critique of Andrew Dupont's book on on Prototype and script.aculo.us by Mark Bernstein:

When chemists consult a volume about professional chemical technique, or when surgeons reach for the latest update on neuroanatomy, they can usually find a book that isn’t couched in terms of silly examples and jokes. So can poets, mathematicians, and geologists. For some reason, though, it has become the accepted practice that language manuals should spend lots of time with silly, self-deprecating jokes, and that their example applications should be breakfast loggers and fantasy football leagues (or, conversely, payroll programs). [...] I don't need the inevitable chapter 1 pitch for the wonderfulness of Javascript and the badness of MSIE, but it might be a good place for a quick summary for the pros. Call by reference • no pointers • primitives are objects • everything has a prototype slot • parens() do this, braces {} do that, brackets [] do something else • single and double quotes are different. Kernighan & Ritchie did this so well in C, and it’s not like we’re not familiar with their example.

Leslie disagrees; I don't: I have had the same problem with many books, especially on the new and hip stuff such as Ruby and Rails. To me, too, Kernighan and Ritchie's C Programming Language is the perfect model for a book on a programming language, and most other technical topics, too. And I very much prefer The Ruby Programming Language to The Pickaxe for the same reason.