I'd say this is a pretty sensible approach. Ultimately if you want to understand JavaScript properly you're going to have to do it barebones for a bit first, so

I'd say this is a pretty sensible approach. Ultimately if you want to understand JavaScript properly you're going to have to do it barebones for a bit first, so why not start there? The only caveat is that JavaScript is still really lacking in a few areas, and you'll probably find yourself wanting some 3rd party parts to help you with them: 1. No modules or dependency management. I believe these are coming in ECMAScript 6, but the browser support isn't there yet. You can invent your own module system by hand and then write out all the script tags but it gets really annoying once you get to say 10 files. I'm using npm (the NodeJS package manager) with Browserify and that seems ok, although there are a few other solutions out there too. 2. I use Lodash to give me some extra operations on functions and collections that aren't in by standard, but I find useful. I'd actually prefer to have a library which provided some good standard data structures instead, but I haven't found the right one yet. 3. DOM manipulation. The standard DOM interface is a bit scabby. I'd recommend D3.js as a pretty nice DOM manipulation library that you can dip into or out of as you like. It's a fairly large learning effort, but I'd say worth it.