I've written about Meteor a few times, recently not too positively (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8230631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8230631),

I've written about Meteor a few times, recently not too positively (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8230631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8230631), but I still think it's the easiest way to get started with full stack JS development. It gives you a bunch of quick wins which is really good for morale, and from there you can slowly start looking at "raw" node if you want to. An essential that might be obvious but in case he missed is that learning JS is much easier in the developer console. If you want to experiment with underscore, go to http://underscorejs.org/ http://underscorejs.org/, hit cmd-i/f12 and type in _.map([1, 2, 3], function (x) { return x * 2; }); or if you want to understand moment, go to http://momentjs.com http://momentjs.com and type moment().fromNow(); in the console -- the library objects are available there and this makes it really fast to try things out.