The part of the guathon presentation I went to a couple of months ago in Leicester square that went right over my head was one by Steve Sanderson on a JavaScript framework called Knockout, it’s obviously a presentation he has delivered many times as I have seen from one of the mix recorded presentations you can check it out and see how much you can absorb at the initial speed.
I emailed Steve to get the presentation slides afterwards which he kindly sent over, however he just took time out one weekend to publish a really nice tutorial section at learn.knockoutjs.com if you want to get your head around a framework that can observably bind text and form elements to update in real time on the client without AJAX then have a look at the tutorials which make far more sense than the super fast presentation!.
I need to update my AutoHotKey library now to get some of these useful snippets in there (text expanders are a bit lazy but so much more efficient than remembering everything and repetitive typing)