In the craftsman's toolbox I would add Virginia Tufte's lovely and inspiring book "Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style". To write better, one must write better sentences. Start here.
With our start-up, the right priority for development was simultaneous mobile and web development. This stack has proven to be the right answer for us. The Parse iOS and Javascript jumpstarted our client developers, ember.js gives us a wickedly responsive web app, and node.js allows us to late bind many of our architecture decisions by optionally hosting core JS on the server or browser. We're happy with the trade-offs that led us to choose this stack.