The diversity of the modern web application development ecosystem is increasing at an astonishing rate. You can see new frameworks and libraries coming out almost every day. People seem to be happy with constantly reinventing the wheel. This could be daunting to new learners as the time it takes to master a new skill makes it sometimes difficult to keep pace with the rate with which technologies are evolving. And this has caused frequent complaints of making web development unnecessarily complicated, as there are many new libraries and frameworks to learn and a large number of new tools to familiarize yourself with. 

The anxiety associated with the feeling that you might not be able to keep up with the mainstream can be released once you have learned how to create a full-stack modern web application and master the skill sets that are required to build such an application. And, with this book, you will learn these skill sets and realize that being a full-stack developer is not only about knowing how to write frontend and backend code. In this book, we will create a real-world, full-stack web application and cover most of the skills that a full-stack developer would require. And once you have finished reading it, you will understand that languages and frameworks are just tools in your toolbox. You can replace them with other languages and frameworks and also build great full-stack applications.

To start our journey, we will begin with the basics. Once you have those basics imprinted in your mind, you can learn the frameworks more efficiently. In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• An introduction to the full-stack web application we will build in this book
• Learning JavaScript from a Java developer's viewpoint
• Learning the features of ECMAScript 2015 that we will use in this book