When you look at today’s job ads, almost every company looks for software developers who know JavaScript. Almost every website uses JavaScript, Backend systems use it as well. It became the Lingua Franca of the Internet.

I came across JavaScript for the first time in 2008 / 2009, while it was still in hibernation mode. Around the same time, a lot of new efforts started to modernize the language and adapt it for the next generation of applications. Let’s look at what you need to get started with JavaScript in 2020:

• Node.js
• A Text Editor
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Atom
  • Vim
  • Sublime Text
  • TextMate
• The Terminal
  • Windows
    • Powershell
    • or WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)
  • macOS
    • Terminal.app
    • or iTerm
  • Linux
    • The terminal that’s shipped by your distro

What You Need For a Frontend Application

• User Interface Libraries
  • React.js
  • Angular
  • Vue.js
  • Ember.js
• Data Visualization
  • D3.js
  • Chart.js
• UI Elements
  • Polymer.js
• State Management
  • Redux
• Testing
  • Jest
  • Mocha
  • Jasmine
• Browser Controllers
  • Nightwatch
  • Nightmare
  • Phantom
  • Puppeteer
  • TestCafe
  • Cypress

What You Need For a Backend Application

• Web Application Framework
  • Express.js
  • Sails.js
  • Fastify
  • Hapi.js
• Testing
  • Mocha
  • Chai.js
  • Expect.js
• Linting
  • ESLint
• Site Generator
  • Gatsby.js

What libraries are you using that are not on this list? Follow me on Twitter and tell me!