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.
Tools
I think a newcomer can benefit enormously by looking at code posted on sites like jsFiddle. Couple that with live reloading and real-time jsHinting and you have a pretty good environment to learn and experiment. I have tried to create an environment like that on Plunker: http://beta.plnkr.co/edit/gist:1986619?p=preview
Language functionality
For a true newcomer, I think several things are necessary:
Once these items are addressed, a newcomer could be introduced to different frameworks that aim to address one or more of these elements, like: