[eagsalazar2]

I have to strongly disagree with people proposing Ember. Several teams I work with, teams with very strong js and rails background, have tried it out and uniformly rejected it as being too restrictive, pointlessly baroque, monolithic, unstable, and with immature tooling (ember-cli in particular). I know a lot of people may disagree with that list but that is my experience and that of several people I respect.

I'm not saying this is the "ideal" front end stack (because that has yet to be created) but a good simple starting point IMO would be backbone + react. Very simple, flexible introduction to concepts like router, functional reactive, and components.

[eagsalazar2]

Also, while I get where people are coming from who recommend plain js, really learning how to do good front end development is only in part about knowing js itself. The OP would also benefit a lot from learning some high level concepts you won't get from doing vanilla js - routing and components in particular - so keep that tradeoff in mind when deciding.

[megalodon]

The high level concepts you refer to are implemented in plain javascript. The general purpose of frameworks is to increase productivity for those who already master the language. You will have a harder time learning if you begin by using abstractions you don't understand.

[bjterry]

Backbone and react.js is indeed an awesome combination for single-page web applications. React makes for an awesome templating layer, and makes the performance of rendering dramatically faster than using more complex Backbone views in the traditional manner. Throw in backbone-react-component to get react views that automatically update when the underlying model or collection changes and you have a damn good stack.

[danabramov]

IMO when already learning React it's no use learning Backbone at all. Better start with Flux.

Backbone is not needed with React and although it is possible for them to be together (hell, we lived React+Backbone for almost a year), everything gets so much nicer when you can finally drop Backbone baggage.

It might be possible though that in order to see where Flux shines, one has to sweat through limitations of Backbone. That may be valuable experience.

[s0uthPaw88]

This has not been my experience at all. Ember-cli post 0.1.0 release has been very easy to work with and has helped me and my team get started using the Ember very quickly. We now have two Ember apps and have not looked back since!