garagegames documentation is usually not
too helpful these days for modding BL, the BLF has much more useful advice a lot of the time, but the basics are nice to have covered. that might also be because i haven't had to go over the basics of TS in a long time tho
i think the biggest thing is that if he said he wants to mod blockland, spending a bunch of time learning how to do things that aren't modding blockland might not be the best way to learn how to do that. it's more of a personal choice, but i generally learn better by directly doing things i want to know how to do, and luckily blockland is a pretty good place to do that. i just find it hard to feel motivated to learn something in a roundabout way, it's much easier to work when i can get instant feedback on my progress toward my real goal. learning how to mod is also more than just knowing a language, most of the work in learning is figuring out the engine and all its quirks and tricks, and that's certainly not something you could ever learn by working in javascript
edit:
torquescript is a easy language to pick up imho. it's like c and c# had a baby but they tried to get it aborted and failed
i rly think it is, even though its syntax error reporting is sometimes a bit mystifying, it's just really easy to quickly test your code and get results right away. JS can do that too in webpages i guess, but it's not really modding blockland