What're your goals? It can help to direct you to the best place for what you're looking for out of JavaScript. I think it's useful to learn vanilla JavaScript well before learning libraries and frameworks.

Useful books. The first is online and free (the other two are as well, somewhere): http://eloquentjavascript.net/

http://www.amazon.com/Professional-JavaScript-Developers-Nic...

http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Patterns-Stoyan-Stefanov/dp...

Solve toy problems to solidify knowledge of methods and syntax: http://coderbyte.com/CodingArea/Challenges/

Good material- lots of video and problems. Not free but worth it: https://www.codeschool.com/ (makers of the jQuery videos below)

Bootstrap - popular front-end framework: http://getbootstrap.com/

Actually build something! A To Do List, a website, a game.

See some different frameworks do the same things: http://todomvc.com/

jQuery: http://try.jquery.com/

Here is a good free node tutorial: http://nodeschool.io/

Some tracks to learn, and get connected with non-profits to make useful things: http://www.freecodecamp.com/

Contributing to open source projects is another route.

And when you're done those, JavaScript Patterns is something you'll refer to often.

http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Patterns-Stoyan-Stefanov/dp...

I bought the MEAP a long time ago (allows you to read chapters as they are released...before edit), and I've casually read along. At the time, JS was not a strong language for me; I've put in the effort to reverse that. The main approach (which I liked): a) explain a topic in text b) illustrate with code c) test code => QED. If you're novice/intermediate with the language, I think it may help explain some of the trickier things. My main critique was that I did find some of the text overly verbose. My favorite book is still Stoyan Stefanov's http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Patterns-Stoyan-Stefanov/dp... and I've read nearly all of them at this point.

Backbone is very minimalist, which is great because it gets out of your way and you rarely end up bundling huge unused chunks of code with your app. However it also means that you're going to have to write a decent amount of boilerplates and make design choices as to how you want the different parts of your application to work together. This can be non trivial and I would advise any newcomer to do it by hand after reading a book like [Javascript Patterns](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596806767.do) but for people who already know where they are going and understand all the implications of such patterns, a framework like Aura can probably speed up development tremendously. With that said I'm going to dive in the Aura source code asap to see what it really looks like. If you know NodeJS, I think it's fair to compare Aura to Restify and Backbone to the http module.

One book that I found to be really good was 'JavaScript Patterns' by Stoyan Stefanov. Great book, though I am not sure how much this article overlaps with the book.

[http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Patterns-Stoyan-Stefanov/dp...]

My favorite is 'JavaScript Patterns' (http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Patterns-Stoyan-Stefanov/dp...).

http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Patterns-Stoyan-Stefanov/dp...

Boom. Get it while it's hot.