Funny you said that, I was looking into ng2 and they've borrowed a few things from the React community. It's all good, I'm glad to see that "framework A is better than framework B" mentality die away and everyone just uses the right tool for the right job.
I just want to point out that 'JavaScript the Good Parts' is not a good first book for beginners. David Flanagan's book is a much better book to start off with or Zakas book `Professional JavaScript for Web Developers` is the one I would suggest, then Crockford's book. Nothing trumps practice though,just keep coding and breaking things just to fix them, that, imo is the way to learn anything.
Backbone has taught me a lot too, I like that it doesn't do any magic. Angular is pretty amazing though at how simple it is to do things with, I'm a bit worried about the magic part. What happens when things start growing and the magic breaks, do you have to read the code base to figure out where it went south? I started playing around with ember too. It's a bit tricky, I found I had to compile it to get it to work, the starter kit wasn't cutting the mustard for me.