[ariabuckles]

I've run into a lot of people who found angular hard to pick up; it's not just you.

One of them now works on the React team, and I found it pretty easy to pick up from the official docs: https://facebook.github.io/react/ . I recommend not bothering with stuff other than the base react library at first (although jsx/babel is nice); you can use react without it and potentially learn that later.

It's also totally valid to just start with basic js/html/jquery. The Mozilla's MDN docs for most html/js things are decent, and jQuery's api docs are pretty good in my experience.