When people try to dive deeper into modern frontend development they might feel overwhelmed by how much stuff there is in modern JavaScript. One can wonder should I learn react or angular? Should I learn that or this? Should I use vim or atom? In any technology once people develop bit more one can condense the information latter on to learn things faster. So in academia people tend not to focus on technology as they rapidly change, instead accent is on the methods and techniques that evolve with the tools.

My suggestion would be for JavaScript beginners to start by focusing on language itself. Questions like what is prototype how does it all work. Then move onto ES6 a bit. From that point on start with some framework. Any framework would do but react seems to be most popular nowdays. For tools one way to look at it is that in the hands of experienced craftsman any rifle will deal killer blow. That is how I’d suggest sticking with devtools that programmers have used for years already as their primary development environment completely replacing IDE. Its omnipresent.

After one would learn a framework or two then comes part where one should learn tooling used to handle builds and things needed to make app ready for production like minification tests and so on. Go to some top github projects and look what they use. Thats usually what you want to learn.

From there on the never ending open sea of frondend awaits new sailors to fare its waters.