Agreed, anyone who uses this as the beginner tutorial it is will be confused for a long time by words like "copy" and "clone" used to mean variable assignment. This is terrible teaching, or somehow the author has an exotic mental model of what the computer is doing.

Agreed. I could see how that line could be confusing. Why don't we change it for the better in that case? How about something like this:

In the example above we create a new variable sally, and assign it the value bill. Both sally and bill reference the same spot in memory. As such we can't change bill out w/ out changing Sally, specifically when a change is made to an object literal it will affect that object across the entire script.

Today I learned that in ECMAScript5 (IE 9 onwards) there is also a function called Object.Create ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global... ) which can be used to copy objects. Kinda.

Something like that would be right.

How about: In the example above we create a new variable sally, and make it equal to bill. Both sally and bill now reference the same object in memory. Changes made via one affect both of them.

Awesome, you rock! Officially updated the post w/ the above :)

Can you do better in a fifteen-minutes-or-less summary? Or at least point to a better one?

Maybe 15 minutes is not enough?