[fChk]

Very much this. Having the full stack under your belt is going to make your life a LOT easier and make you more marketable as a web developer. Within the last year I learned the ins and outs of JS, DOM and AJAX and the quality of services and products have increased 10-fold. As @fChk said, always keep learning. I will see websites that I like and look at their code to see how something was achieved, that way if I ever need to create a similar solution I have the ability to do so.

Good for you @tbelldesignco !.. Nice to see that there are still folks doing things the right way.

I've been campaigning against the use of frameworks (PHP's and JS's) for the last 10 years!.. Without much success I would say... Folks like to ride over the first hyped-up framework they find when they get interested in WebDev.. while knowing little to nothing on the fundamentals that those framework abstract for them... which is a shame!.. because they become locked-in in that framework logic and assumptions....

Really not the way to go!.. I'm not against frameworks entirely -although I don't use them because, to me, they are useless abstractions that prevent folks from interacting with the APIs that really matter- but more against their use without first acquiring the REAL DEAL (ie the fundamental Web technologies that are at the base of the whole thing, starting from HTTP protocols -1,2 and very soon 3- and ending with the latest HTML-5 browser API.)