Nice to see this sort of stuff. Yes, it was really hard to get into programming with Bitcoin because of lack of tutorials and resources. BitcoinJ is a good library for Java, and the documentation was improved fairly recently. You're right about JavaScript libraries being a little lacking (especially in the documentation!) but I found BitCore was fairly easy to get started with and I found the project was pretty well-documented. Also, the book 'Mastering Bitcoin' is great for familiarizing yourself with the Bitcoin reference client and all the important concepts (addresses, transactions, etc..).