Hi Michael,
Here's what appears to be a decent beginning tutorial/reference in Javascript :
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/diaries/
with more links on this page:
http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/
This is the first time I've used javascript and it seems fairly easy to pick up (tho I've done some programming years ago in C and bash shell, so that helps). It looks like there's no memory management stuff to deal with, variables don't need to be typed, so javascript is probably a good place to start and it applies to MoI.
Hope that helps a little ---

Paul