I will go ahead and add some points and disagree with other points.
1. I believe that the best path is to start from the top. Start with the most user-facing side of the tech stack, the client-side. Why? Because further down the stack (esp. deployment and DBs), there are more and more modern services/libraries that abstract things away. So things like Parse, Firebase, ORMS, Heroku, hosted DBs, MongoHQ, etc. I'm not saying you should never learn these things, just that in terms of getting an app out the door really quickly, the client-side is the most important piece.
2. Agreed with sentiments on this thread about starting with Bootstrap and jQuery. I'll chime in and say that while I greatly prefer Angular to Backbone, Backbone can be fairly educational. If you find Backbone frustrating, check out AngularJS. Whether or not you use an html templating language or CSS preprocessor is really up to personal choice. I'd start with bare HTML honestly. Although CSS is enough of a pain to code in that I'd recommend SCSS from the get-go.
3. I'll be pedantic for a bit and point out that Node.js is not a framework - it's a runtime environment for JS with some additional standard libs (like a barebones http library). You almost certainly need something like Express.
4. Here things diverge a bit. I'm a big fan of node.js. But let's be clear about what your goals are. If you want to get employed at a startup, Rails is vastly more popular and widely used than node.js, and for good reasons. So if that is your goal, that should be a clear winner. But if that doesn't concern you, or if you're too lazy to learn Ruby, I wholeheartedly endorse starting with node on the server-side. You get to focus your energy on one language, get to share your IDEs, tooling, and testing setup between the client and server, and get something that's highly scalable to boot.
1. I believe that the best path is to start from the top. Start with the most user-facing side of the tech stack, the client-side. Why? Because further down the stack (esp. deployment and DBs), there are more and more modern services/libraries that abstract things away. So things like Parse, Firebase, ORMS, Heroku, hosted DBs, MongoHQ, etc. I'm not saying you should never learn these things, just that in terms of getting an app out the door really quickly, the client-side is the most important piece.
2. Agreed with sentiments on this thread about starting with Bootstrap and jQuery. I'll chime in and say that while I greatly prefer Angular to Backbone, Backbone can be fairly educational. If you find Backbone frustrating, check out AngularJS. Whether or not you use an html templating language or CSS preprocessor is really up to personal choice. I'd start with bare HTML honestly. Although CSS is enough of a pain to code in that I'd recommend SCSS from the get-go.
3. I'll be pedantic for a bit and point out that Node.js is not a framework - it's a runtime environment for JS with some additional standard libs (like a barebones http library). You almost certainly need something like Express.
4. Here things diverge a bit. I'm a big fan of node.js. But let's be clear about what your goals are. If you want to get employed at a startup, Rails is vastly more popular and widely used than node.js, and for good reasons. So if that is your goal, that should be a clear winner. But if that doesn't concern you, or if you're too lazy to learn Ruby, I wholeheartedly endorse starting with node on the server-side. You get to focus your energy on one language, get to share your IDEs, tooling, and testing setup between the client and server, and get something that's highly scalable to boot.