I just skimmed through the Pragmatic Programmers CoffeeScript book. It looks like a great introduction to the language that covers a lot of ground and does so in enough depth to really get you going. I guess you can do that with such a concise languagee.

Off the top of my head, things that make CoffeeScript attractive to me:

• REPL
• clear syntax
• based on “the good parts”
• modules
• inheritance model
• clean function definitions
• jQuery integration
• Node.js & websockets
• It’s in Rails by default
• A lot of deployment options, including Rack

Now I just need to start messing with the language and writing some programs with it.