Ask HN: What is the best JavaScript stack for a beginner to learn?

But it's not that bad when you have someone behind you, helping you when really needed, and showing you what you can achieve afterwards.

Jumping into JQuery, copy/pasting snippets from google and such won't (well, not often anyway) bring novices very far. Plus, they'll have a hard time learning other frameworks if needed (new job, etc.).

The advice of learn "vanilla javascript" break if your targets (=browsers) are older than, lets say, THIS YEAR.

So, is the interest to do only "modern javascript" aka "this year release of browsers implementation of JS"? or "javascript as understood by, please not! internet explorer 6?".

So "vanilla javascript" is different depending in how much "modern" we are talking about. With truly recent JS, is possible to avoid jquery. If you are only in the server-side, Javascript IS == NODE.

So? No universal version (that could be retrofit to older devices) of JS exist on this earth (and the same apply to CSS3).

Think is like C/C++: The same bloat, pain as experience by the first users at the dawn of it, plus half-baked new shinny things, that are not universally used, and never equally across the board.

So, is very likely you need to learn "real vanilla javascript = as understood in the IE6 era, perhaps some versions up (if lucky) plus "jquery".

You can avoid jquery if use some kind of niche stack, but, jquery IS javascript as "everyone" use it. Think no only in raw use, but, interfacing with libraries and stuff. So, jquery is the "rails" of js, could be argued.

IF you actually have total control on the deployment environment, and on the use of external dependencies, you can SKIP JS and use coffescript, elm, typescript, etc. But you need to be very lucky to be in this position ;)

To dive in pick one with a lot of good documentation and a strong community. Pick a popular one and get to know it well, they all solve the same problem, so understanding the problem is more important. Take a look here, for an idea of popularity: http://libscore.com/data.html

If asked to make a call, I'd say Angular - it's massively popular and growing. It's on practically every interviewers list. And chances are, even if they break backwards compatibility, the community will fork and continue a 1.* branch.

Example of first week complexity: make a choose-your-own-adventure player from a list of {id="sec01", text:"..", links:[{'Continue':'sec02'}, ]}s.

Second week: Wrap the chrome speech API[1] to produce a "game editor" for the above format.

Third week: make a youtube playlist editor that plays a list of time intervals from youtube videos: [{'tStart':0, 'tStop':451.3, 'url':'utube/URL'}, {..}, {..}, ... ]

It's just "toys," but they're immediately useful. In general I think ''file://localhost'' development of .js is a good place to start because of the immediate feedback---it either works or it doesn't.

@nielmalhotra One thing you can tell ur friend is that everyone is a beginner with the most of the modern APIs. So by reading the docs and trying things out he's already a "research level" web dev ;)

[1] http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html