Question: If a newcomer to JavaScript asked you for essential libraries and tools, what would you tell them? You don’t want to overwhelm them with too many suggestions!
Focus: language-related functionality (as opposed to browser-related functionality).
- Libraries: including, say, Underscore.js and promises libraries, but excluding jQuery et al.
- Tools: package managers, build tools, unit test tools, etc.
- Less important: editors, IDEs. Rationale: it’s fairly obvious that you need them. There are other tools that people might not even know that they need.
more context but still too vague ... you need cross Desktop quick prototyping? Why exclude jQuery then!
Do you need performance? You, as newcomer, are kinda screwed by default but there are libraries focused on getting less things done, abstraction speaking, but in a blazing fast and reliable API way!
Do you need to learn node.js and/or server side JS ? Again, would that be node.js or something else? 'cause in Rhino world, and nowadays Ringo too, you have easy access to Java world so many other options/choices compared to node.
Then again, mobile? desktop? tablets? gnome? ChromeOS? FirefoxOS? WHC? JScript? JScript.NET? TypeScript? CoffeeScript? ... and so on ...
Long story short: JavaScript is truly adopted everywhere so, the very first welcome would be: "please tell me you are not asking thins thinking is going to work everywhere ... " :D
for tests I go wru personally. and it does, always, bloody work! always, no matter where!