With the release of Calypso, Automattic has shown their view of the future of WordPress.com and how users will interact with sites. JavaScript driven applications offer a faster interaction for folks working on their sites.
Time to jump in and learn how to use JavaScript to create interfaces and allow clients to interact with their custom WordPress.org sites that I create for them.
My strategy has been to read some of the better JavaScript books: Javascript – The Good Parts, and Functional Javascript. After an overview there, the next step is to use Lynda.com courses and get some hands on experience. Internally WordPress uses jQuery, underscores, and backbone. That seems like a good place to start. Lynda courses on my playlist: Up and running with Underscores, Javascript: Functions, Up and running with Backbone, Up and running with React, and WordPress REST API (WP-API): First Look.
Time to write some code.