It's a history through a lens, but if there is one I'd say "MIT/Stanford" as a central axis rather than a field of reesarch.
And Javascript? My own choice. The amount of "language" I needed was very small and I actually like the very minimalistic (lisp-y?) sort of Javascript you can write these days if you just ignore most of its history. It's accessible, that was more important to me than anything else - one of the few concessions where I wanted to make things digestible to as wide an audience as possible in a language that was good for the problem at hand. Strangely enough, it worked very well (I think).
I heard your (and others') request for a better sample chapter than the intro that Amazon shows, I'll put it on the site as soon as possible.