Hi Jeremy,

This is a quick check-list, you might see some seemingly random things in here, don't worry it's basically me giving my opinion on popular topics. This is my opinion and should be treated accordingly, frameworks are not bias opinions, it is what is popular/trending at the moment, according to most job postings( research was done by myself using mainly indeed for the London(UK) area ).

ESSENTIAL FRONT END SKILLS (For sure!)

• HTML
• CSS

• JavaScript/jQuery

• Git/Github! (Use it everyday, depend on it, love it)

CSS TOOLS

• Responsive design principles ("Mobile first" is another build methodolgy that you'll want to get your head around)

Preprocessors

• Sass (learn the SCSS syntax, I don't see Sass very often, too weird)
• Less (too old, don't bother, once you have SCSS it's very similar)

JAVASCRIPT FRAMEWORKS

• Angular.js and/or

• React.js

• Babel JS (this seems to be pretty hot at the moment -- ES6 JS in browsers that don't support it, it'll be the next thing I look at)

CSS FRAMEWORKS

I wouldn't worry about these, once you have a solid HTML/CSS/JS they'll come naturally. Can be a good source of inspiration for best practice ideas

• Bootstrap
• Foundation

NICE-TO-HAVES

Unit testing

I don't have a strong opinion on these, because I haven't dug far enough into front-end testing. Worth a dig around though.

• Jasmine
• Karma

Task runners

• Grunt (No)
• Gulp (Yes)

Hope this helps!

Jeremey,

I am glad you took this on and are exploring the field of web development. Now, you can't separate javascript from the frontend. It is first and foremost the a frontend language. So to start out with a solid foundation in javascript is good, jquery is standard for a lot of frontend projects. Object Oriented Javascript is you next step.

As far as frameworks go there are a lot that can help you become a more attractive candidate for jobs. But you have to choose which side you'd like to dive into. If you want to build an app and have experience and knowledge of how the different layers work, the treehouse course on express.js is awesome. Helps you get started fairly quickly.

I would get extremely comfortable building interactive user interface components before I jump into templating and routing. So I guess this would be my list.

Vanilla js

Object oriented js

jquery

ajax

ReactJS

d3.js for data visualization

node.js

express.js

meteor.js

angularJS

The list could go on for as long as you want it to be. But this covers a whole lot.

Hope this helps. DFTBA