Ask HN: How much JavaScript do I need to know before I start learning Meteor?

Not much, but the concepts of how Meteor works under the hood is beneficial in order not to misunderstand how it works under the hood and avoid the traps of all the magic it does.

Here's a few things you should read more about prior to or when you are writing Meteor:

- Architecture of Meteor - Because hype told us you're writing one big JS app and throwing away the idea of client-server. NO, you will still end up writing client-only and server-only code, esp validations and API calls (which you don't really want to put in client-side code).

- Node.js - It's handy to know what you can use in server-side code to avoid duplicating work.

- AJAX - The concept of server-side methods closely mimics AJAX (call and callback style).

- MongoDB - Basic knowledge of CRUD functions in Mongo are nice to have. Especially "upsert" (insert/update) which was very handy in place of "check if exists and update or insert" operations.

- Basics on reactive programming - Under the hood, everything's observed. When things change, it's a domino effect afterwards.

I usually read up a book with basics for the language and then start a project with a framework and (this is important) whenever I write or paste code I do not understand I will look it up and try to figure out exactly what is happening.