With the sudden importance of Ajax, it's time to take JavaScript seriously. That means learning it the right way: looking at the fundamentals of the language and surveying its strengths and weaknesses, instead of just copying other people's poorly written examples.

JavaScript got a bum rap. It's almost universally derided among serious programmers for being a toy language, or for its strange characteristics, or bugs, or slowness, or because it's only good for adding useless window dressing to web pages.

But JavaScript is actually a very nice little language which is popping up everywhere these days (not just in Ajax apps). Sure, JavaScript is quirky, but its problems are mostly due to history, association, and misunderstanding. Especially misunderstanding. Let's face it: most developers learned JavaScript by looking at examples in web pages they found online, and few of those examples are paragons of JavaScript style. Other developers learned JavaScript from books, but the typical JavaScript book ignores the fundamentals of the language, instead focusing on examples and the fastest ways to do fancy web page tricks.

In this talk, we'll go back to the basics that most JavaScript resources omit. We'll talk about JavaScript as a language, learning its fundamental concepts and the simple rules that underlie the sometimes bewildering behavior.

Building on part 1, this talk dives deep into JavaScript's object model. We'll see how it differs from more mainstream object-oriented languages, and why. We'll explore how to hide some of those differences, as well as the reasons you might not want to. Additionally, we'll cover useful tools for JavaScript testing, debugging, and profiling.

Ajax is not the focus of this talk, but a strong foundation in JavaScript is essential for working with Ajax.

The support infrastructure for your software project is a crucial factor for success. A new generation of tools offers significant benefits over their predecessors. This talk discusses how to choose the right mix of tools for a top-shelf project infrastructure.

The support infrastructure for your software project is a crucial factor for success. Many projects waste enormous amounts of time fighting through projects without the help of good tools. Other projects are on the right track, but could be even more successful by filling some crucial infrastructure gaps or by moving to improved tools, or by implementing policies that maximize the tools' power.

This talk looks at the latest generation of infrastructure tools, what makes them better, and how to use them well. Additionally, we'll examine the role of the infrastructure on projects and identify principles that help us understand what kinds of infrastructure we need. Tools examined will include CruiseControl, Rake, Subversion, Trac, and others.

The Java Collections framework is a cornerstone of Java development. It's been a part of J2SE for six years now. Every Java developer knows it—how to create Lists, Maps, and Sets, how to put things into them and take things out, and how to iterate over the contents. But there's a lot more to the collections framework than that -- and very few programmers really know how to exploit the power that's just under the surface.

The basics of the collections classes are so simple that many developers haven't even thought to look for the additional power that's there. And it's not just built-in capabilities, either. The design of the collections framework makes possible several powerful techniques and patterns that can magnify your productivity, as well as helping you build systems that are efficient and scalable.

It may seem strange to give a talk on a framework that every Java programmer already knows. But in every project I've worked on for the past six years, I've seen a lot of code that uses the collections poorly. More often than not, that code was written by skilled programmers with significant Java experience. In this talk, you'll learn how to use the collections well, exploiting their full power—the little-known capabilities, the extensibility features, and powerful patterns such as wrappers, adapters, and decorators. We'll also cover some new features that slipped into Java 1.5, plus a few especially useful third-party collection implementations.