No, there are sometimes genuinely new technologies: ideas or frameworks that have not been previously explored. Google's PageRank algorithm is a good example. It's not often that you see genuinely new ideas in programming languages, although it does happen occasionally. Javascript as a language doesn't push any boundaries, although it's an alright language overall.

I don't know what books would be best to learn event driven programming. That would be a good question to have an answer to. My point in suggesting a book is that it's the concepts here that matter, not that you are using a Javascript, Python, Ruby, or C# implementation, or a language built around the idea like Erlang. Once you know the concepts, you can quickly and easily pick up or even build a framework in any language.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that Node and the community isn't doing well. It's just that many of us are quite confused by the massive hype around it. Javascript might be a fine choice in some situations, but in general, on the server side you have many different languages to choose from and many (most?) of them also have competent event driven frameworks available. It would surprise me if most development shops didn't have server side developers who work daily with a language other than Javascript.