If you got to the point of having a tree, but found them clumsy to work with, the first thing I'd suggest is to play with an AST explorer. https://astexplorer.n

If you got to the point of having a tree, but found them clumsy to work with, the first thing I'd suggest is to play with an AST explorer. https://astexplorer.net/ https://astexplorer.net/ is quite good. Picture the task of what you want to do in your head. Maybe you're writing a linter, and you want to enforce a rule like "never use the 'var' keyword". Write some example code and poke around in the explorer. Another thing to keep in mind is that once you have a tree, usually you also want to have some tree traversal utilities, so that you can walk over the tree and optionally transform it.