ETech 2006 has kicked off and of the presentations I’ve looked at so far today, two have stood out in particular:

Simon Willison’s A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript should be compulsory reading for every single person doing JavaScript as part of their job. It covers almost every aspect of the language I can think of, and does so well. It’s 111 slides, but is actually very short for the wealth of understandable, to-the-point material it contains.

Ray Ozzie (of Microsoft) has worked with a Concept Development team there and come up with Wiring the Web, a way to copy an individual structured item on a page (such as a person’s contact details, an event, a photo, whatever) from the web, and paste it into a desktop application (he’s called it Live Clipboard). This is really good stuff and should have come along much sooner – it’s just how people have expected the web to behave for years now.

In order to get a really good idea of what he’s done, watch the screencasts

By the way, a lot of idiots are talking about Ray’s demo without actually, you know, watching it or understanding it, so please do take the time to watch the screencasts before you post to your site saying how stupid this is.

In addition, Dustin Diaz has written a great review (with sample usage code and explanations) of part of Yahoo’s new JavaScript library: Forget addEvent, use Yahoo!’s Event Utility. We’ve started using some of the Yahoo! code at work, so I’m sure this will come in handy.