This is great, but what I think is sorely needed is a roadmap to navigating the maze of module systems, transpilers, preprocessors, packagers, etc.<p>Why do npm and bower both exist? What is the difference between UglifyJS and Closure Compiler? Do I want WebPack or Browserify? Should I use these standalone or should I use them together with Gulp, Grunt, or another build tool? Which of the hundreds or thousands of plugins for the build tools should I use (Gulp has 1,532 plugins and Grunt has 4,403!!)? Should I use CommonJS, ES6 modules, AMD, UMD, or something else? Don't even get me started on application-level frameworks like React, Angular, Ember, etc.<p>I have reasonably good answers to these questions in my head right now, but three days ago I had no clue. And it really is a maze, because while all of these projects have flashy web pages and nifty "getting started" guides, their docs rarely explain the role of their tool in the big picture, and its relationship to other tools, they just give you examples and point to recipes. And there aren't a set of best practices for setting up a project that cover 99% of common needs painlessly -- you really have to get your hands dirty and configure the tools, in my experience.<p>I mean, take a step back and writing JavaScript in 2015 is pretty weird. Writing JavaScript in Node.js involves writing things like require() that the browser doesn't understand at all. So you have to run code like that through a tool before you can use it in a browser at all. But what tool exactly? There are so many to choose from, all of which have their own way of being configured. To write JavaScript in 2015, you basically have to sit down and choose a language dialect design a compiler pipeline to match.<p>I mean, just look at the Babel "setup" guide and how many different variations there are in the instructions based on what tools/frameworks you are using! <a href="https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/#make" rel="nofollow">https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/#make</a><p>The point of all this isn't to criticize, but more to offer my experience of being extremely confused/overwhelmed.<p>Hopefully a lot of this will get better once ES6 is ubiquitous.