I’ve been gorging on new technology this week. It all started with Episode 6 of Doug Crockford’s “Crockford on JavaScript“, an excellent series of evening Yahoo! technical talks that on the history of programming and the JavaScript language that originally ran between January and March 2010. Episode 6, “Loopage”, recorded last August, is a sequel of sorts that covers the JavaScript event-loop, (one of my heros) Grace Murray Hopper, and the problems of concurrency and network latency.
The JavaScript even-loop is an important part of the web browser and it is now available on the server courtesy of Google’s open-source V8 JavaScript engine, developed for Chrome, and the new Node.js library. Following this I watched several other episodes of the collection of technical talks from the YUI Theatre collection, including interesting a couple of talks on the benefits of running JavaScript on the server and client, node.js itself, HTML5, and YUI3. There’s a nice retrospective of the YUI Theatre collection for 2010 in net.tuts+ and a good series of screencasts by Pedro Teixeira on a new site called NodeTuts.
Yahoo! may be suffering from an identity crisis at the top, but its team of web developers and JavaScript evangelists are second to none and the quality of their offerings on the Yahoo! Tech Dev web site and YUI theatre are excellent. Tech heads should go along and expect to spend a while there. Highly recommended.
My personal highlights (in some kind of thematic order are):
- Douglas Crockford — the whole of Crockford on JavaScript (so good it has its own website).
- Ryan Dahl — Node.js Roadmap.
- Douglas Crockford — Crockford on JavaScriptScene 6: Loopage.
- Dav Glass — Node.js + YUI 3.
- Matt Taylor — YUI 3 & Node.js for JavaScript View Rendering on Client or Server.
- Allen Rabinovich — The Many Hats of the Frontend Engineers.
- Tantek Çelik — HTML5: Right Here, Right Now.
There are so many more to watch that I’m in nerd heaven.
