Should I learn Angular 1 or 2? Or Ember? Or Backbone? Or all?

I work with PHP and Javascript for a while now, and I am up to date with most concepts that are out there. I was always driven by the idea that I should learn what I use when I use it. And I never used any of those frameworks up until now. I looked at them out of curiosity and then completely ignored them, because at work I use extjs from Sencha.

For me, it was more important to have a good understanding of core javascript than have some knowledge of different things I do not use but I could easily learn when the need comes. These days, people like to see popular names in your CV... I like React and Vue, but for some, Vue is a bit obscure. And then again, React is just a name out of many that should be there, but they are not... Is hard to judge if my time is well spent learning those things, as opposed to focusing on other topics, like architecture, DDD, maybe a new language... What do you think?

Well, here are my 2 cents: Learn as much as possible. Never stop learning! But be sure which order is the right one for you. What do you need t the moment? For your current project? What technology is good in terms of things you already know. As an example (looking at the libraries you ask about):

Angular (either 1 or 2) is a bad idea. It mixes up everything web developer's agreed to separate (because it makes sense to separate). You will have to put your logic into your structure ultimately making overview hard for you and even harder for your team. Also you might sometimes not be able to mix, match and reuse partials because of Angular.
Same for Ember. Really, those things were designed when we did not have HTML partials, yet.
Backbone serves a completely different purpose: data locality. That's a good thing and you might want to learn it. You can combine it with a Flux framework of your choice in order to keep action in your JS and define bindings in one central place.
React is one implementation of Flux. The idea is good, so I guess you should go for it in case you plan on making applications with web technologies.
Vue... I have never played around with Vue, so I cannot tell you anything about it, sry.

Now you might wonder, what interface framework I think is a good idea. Let me redirect you to https://www.polymer-project.org/1.0/ . Polymer is like using templates with HTML, JS and CSS. Packed together to a unit. Directly in HTML (at least that's the vision).

tl;dr: Go for React, Polymer and Backbone. You can use all three in one project, so you do not really have to decide for one or the other with those.

Although I feel like you might be wrong with Ember. Ember-cli makes it really easy to separate my project into easily dissectable code. I can in all my projects go into the same folder and know what I will find there. I have only build ember with mongo,node, and express. So really it's just like building with Angular. I don't see what you mean by having to put logic into my structure being an issue. Wouldn't a logical structure make for an easier project to overview? Like I said all my projects look the same. And other projects by other developers look the same.

@mjwrazor I think you got something mixed up there. Angular and Ember mix stuff into your HTML which you would expect in a separate script and try to abstract things inside your actual HTML which cannot easily be abstracted, which leads to ugly constructions inside your HTML. HTML5 Components, however, mix into HTML nicely because they are HTML. Compare {{input type="email" value=email placeholder="Enter your Gravatar e-mail"}} to <gravatar-email></gravatar-email>. If you prefer the fist one, that's OK, but I personally like sticking to standards instead of "hacky" libraries which try to achieve stuff in a more complex way (performance, traffic, libs to learn, ....) when we already solved that exact stuff in a standard.

@maruru Hmm I thought you meant structure of the project and not the structure of the html. I will have to look at html5 docs to see what you are talking about. However I still prefer the frameworks for making projects easier. My opinion of course.

Learn React!

Out of all the libraries listed, React's API has by far the smallest surface area. With other frameworks / libraries, you will spend most of your time learning an API, but with React, you will spend most of your time gaining a deeper understanding of JavaScript.

Just to give a brieg example, to iterate over an array to create a list of items with React you use a built in JavaScript method and ES6 arrow function (see below psuedocode):

<ul>
     {things.map((thing) => <li>{thing.whatever}</li>)}
</ul>

In Angular, you would need to use the Angular API's ng-repeat method, which will look something like...

<div ng-app ng-controller="MyCtrl">
    <ul>
        <li ng-repeat="(thing, whatever) in things">{{thing}}: {{whatever}}</li>
    </ul>
</div>

React is not really all that hard to learn because of this, but the payoff for learning React is very high. You will be building better UI than you ever have. Angular 1, Ember, etc. will give you fish while React will teach you how to fish.

It is quite brilliant and I strongly recommend it as something to learn to improve your FE JavaScript skillset.

Ember seems very familiar to me at least considering you can see how it's connected. but it is just handlebars

<ul> {{#each model as |thing|}} <li>thing: {{thing.whatever}} {{/each}} </ul>

It would be nice to know how you made your code pop out as well.

Hi Marcus, It's quite easy. Just add three back ticks before and after your code. You can read more about markdown here: guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown

Hi Ovidiu, as your time permits I would recommend you learn as much as you can, even if you have no immediate plans to use these different frameworks. The reasons why you should do this are many but the top of the list would include: 1) continuing education is always a good idea; 2) great engineers tend to be found on these big projects and so learning from them can only improve your own coding; 3) you may be called on to use another project in the future and knowing the "ground floor" will greatly decrease your ramp-up time; and, 4) coding is much like writing in that as a general rule any good author will read more than s/he writes.

As for what's going on out there right now: Backbone is still being used on new projects and many older projects. (See Trello) It's not that difficult of a framework to grasp so I would start there if you've had no experiences with it. Learning the framework will also get you used to more advanced frontend methodologies.

Learn React. It's being used everywhere now, especially in enterprise level projects. It's super easy to grasp (you can learn the basics and begin coding within a day or two). Most of your time here will be spent on learning the hundreds of addons, mixins, and state-handling packages (like Redux).

Vue is a new framework and so not used widely (yet). It may or may not be picked up but it would be worth reading through the docs and learning the basics in case it does.

Angular 1 is dead so don't waste your time. Angular 2 is a monster (with Typescript) and will take the longest to pick up. It's also a mixed bag. A lot of companies are dumping it for React for this reason. Some others are picking it up because it does well at controlling logic across really large teams.

You can't go wrong with learning more even if you may not use a framework. Learning the underlying ifs/wheres/whys will teach you how to code better. :)

Update: I don't mean you shouldn't learn Angular 1 because, like many Backbond projects, there are a lot of Angular 1 projects our there as well. I mean I wouldn't seriously learn it to plan to develop with it.

You can start with Angular2 + TypeScript. It's a whole new level of JavaScripting

I wouldn't recommend going with Angular 1 as you will have to deal with lots of DSLs - Directives, Filters, $scope, $rootScope, Controllers and what not! That's the reason the folks at Google have completely rewritten it and the new framework is called Angular 2. If you want to go with Angular path, then you should start directly with 2.0.

Now React is also a tempting choice. The plus side is that :

You will deal with pure JS (and ES6) code - no DSLs. If you know JS, you can build React components.
You will get to work with Unidirectional Data flow concepts and Flux architecture. IMO, this going to be the architecture of future.
You can build universal JavaScript apps .
Huge community.
Easily pick up React Native and build mobile apps (probably reuse some components?).

and much more.

So, my vote goes to React and it looks good on your resume too!

I write php but at the moment i use a php framework called Laravel. After learning jQuery, I found Angular Js (Angular 1) very useful and works best with php especially my php framework (Laravel). I really felt in love with Angular Js. I highly recommend it to you.

I haven't tried React, but from what I can read it's very similar to Vue? I started with Angular but my projects always turned into a mess and it felt like a dependency hell to define my dependencies for core features and especially errors messages has been like reading yiddish to me. Vue on the other hand has very informative warnings and errors that points me directly to every mistake I make. I don't always know the solution first off, but I do know where to start debugging.

I just think Vue and with components are very powerful for scaling, reusability and delegating. I wouldn't use it too much for SEO pages though.

Hi Ovidiu, I share my personal experience. Less than 4 months ago, I was in your same situation, and at first, I started learning Angular 1. I found it very easy to learn, but when I started using it in more complex projects, it got always harder and my script were not as clear as I would. That's why I switched to React. In my opinion it's another world. It's far better and as the project grows, the code is still very simple to understand. At now, the are still a lot of things I have to learn about React, but I really feel like suggesting it to you. Expecially if you switch to Node JS as well, it gets extremely powerful. Hope it can help you in taking your decision!

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