I want to learn JavaScript. For this recently I had purchased a book named “JavaScript The Good Parts” from OReilly’s. Though this book is pretty old, but I got some good feedback about this book. I want to learn to write plain JavaScript code from scratch and then move to jquery. Is there any suggestion with this vision?
I have another question, just for curiosity — is it possible to use JavaScript or jquery for developing desktop application inside?
JavaScript The Good Parts is a great book for Javascript, I wouldn’t recommend it for learning the language. You should come back to it once you understood the concepts of the language.
As @PitaJ already mentioned in the comments you should take a look at the learning section here: https://stackoverflow.com/tags/javascript/info
And yes, it is possible to develop desktop applications. However you will need software that allows you to do that. i.e.: http://appjs.org/ or http://www.tidesdk.org/
Speaking from a quality point of view, software developed like this will probably never reach the level of natively build applications.
You might also find the node.js project interesting.
EDIT: Windows 8 also allows you to build desktop Javascript application. MSDN Javascript Apps for Windows