Currently working through John Resig's "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja," but as soon as I finish that I'm totally buying this. The sample chapter looks fantastic! Congrats on finishing the book, guys.
Discover Meteor
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Re: Discover Meteor
#32I have read the beta release of the book in its entirety. I do not know the book's authors personally, so I can give an unbiased assessment of the book and answer specific questions about the book.
The Crux of the Matter:
Coming from Node.js/Backbone.js/Express.js, I was pleasantly shocked and surprisingly inspired by how pleasurable and productive it is to develop with Meteor. I am not sure I feel this way about any other web-dev technology besides jQuery. Meteor is so awesome that it makes the book easy to get through and fun to learn from (the book is a web app, a book, and a tutorial in one; it is more than just a book, hence my use of the word “use” instead of “read”).
The book covers most of the big Meteor concepts with example code and it guides you along as you build the Microscope web app—a "real world" application you can deploy and actually use. You will learn so much and get through the book so quickly that you will want to develop your own web app with Meteor in an instant. Be warned: You will be giddy with excitement at how easy it is to get stuff done with Meteor. Using Meteor is analogous to using an iPhone for the first time after using one of those "smartphones" [1] that were available prior to the launch of the iPhone.
The alternative to using this book is to learn Meteor by painstakingly browsing and reading the thorough (but not necessarily logically organized for structured learning) Meteor docs. Forget finding a proper "Getting Started with Meteor" tutorial; they are outdated and lack depth. The book summarizes some of the important Meteor concepts in a logical, succinct, and exemplary manner, with hands-on implementation.
There are some specific Meteor core concepts that the book either doesn't cover or only discusses briefly, like eJSON, Deps, Custom Reactivity, and cursor.observe (similar to Backbone's model.on events). But fortunately, Chris Maher does an excellent job covering these topics in depth on EventedMind.com [2]. Therefore, I highly recommend the book along with frequent visits to EventedMind.com to get a thorough understanding of Meteor.js, so you can confidently start building Meteor apps straightaway.
It is worth noting that the book's format (a web app with comments, videos, frequent updates, and the main Microscope tutorial, in addition to PDF and eBook copies of the book) is groundbreaking and must be celebrated. Every book on any web development topic should be published in this manner. Authors take note.
Background: I am the dude blogging at http://javascriptissexy.com/ and I am a Frontend Developer (JavaScript Guru). Incidentally, I will likely write a detailed blog post about Meteor ("How to Learn Meteor Properly," perhaps) in a few weeks, after I develop my first Meteor app.
[1] http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/sanyo-katana-6600-black/...
Re: Discover Meteor
#33I find the "See the packages" button to be confusing. I clicked on it just to see what would happen. As a newcomer to the page, I had no idea that you'd be selling the book in "packages" and assumed that "packages" was referring to software packages (i.e. libraries, etc.). My first reaction was literally "how do I get the book?" or "how do I find out more about the book?".
Re: Discover Meteor
#34I have read the beta release of the book in its entirety. I do not know the book's authors personally, so I can give an unbiased assessment of the book and answer specific questions about the book. The Crux of the Matter: Coming from Node.js/Backbone.js/Express.js, I was pleasantly shocked and surprisingly inspired by how pleasurable and productive it is to develop with Meteor. I am not sure I feel this way about any…
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Re: Discover Meteor
#35This looks fantastic. I am considering a purchase. Just curious, why didn't you use meteor to make discovermeteor.com?
meteor is not to build static web sites. Its for build Single Page Apps.
Re: Discover Meteor
#36I have read the beta release of the book in its entirety. I do not know the book's authors personally, so I can give an unbiased assessment of the book and answer specific questions about the book. The Crux of the Matter: Coming from Node.js/Backbone.js/Express.js, I was pleasantly shocked and surprisingly inspired by how pleasurable and productive it is to develop with Meteor. I am not sure I feel this way about any…
I, too, was lucky enough to get in on the preview and read most of the book. I've read a couple of these books and this one takes the cake. It's huge, very thorough, and incredibly easy to follow along.
If you're thinking about getting into Meteor, you should definitely grab a copy. It's a really easy read that teaches you a lot.
Oh, and Meteor is sexy, I'm glad you're a fan Richard. I'm a big fan of your site and can't wait to see you get engulf in the Meteor hysteria. :)
Re: Discover Meteor
#37I wish that beautiful 3-D rendered copy existed in real life. That cover is too beautiful not to be sitting on my desk. It is a truly nice touch to see a technical book sweat the design details.
Sacha is an awesome designer.
Re: Discover Meteor
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking $30 for a book is shocking? I expect to pay at least that for a good technical book. This is a book I paid $60 for: http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-Interface-System-Han... I did so because the information in it is relevant to my job, it's unlikely to change in a significant way over the next decade, and I was tired of not having a single place to look up Linux systems stuff. If I was a web developer us…
" Asking $30 for a book is shocking? " Where did you get that? He explicitly said that "if the information contained is proven to be valuable and well-expressed than yes, I agree, $39 (or even $99 or whatever) is totally worth it." He literally said the exact opposite of what you are alleging that he said. Literally. His shock was in regards to the fact that the offer no sample chapter (which they probably should).
I got it from: "So asking people to pony-up that kind of money is a little shocking."
I was confused by his phrasing. I thought he meant it was an unknown quantity because he had not read it.
Re: Discover Meteor
#39as a backend engineer the publish/subscribe part of this seems like a scalability nightmare. is anyone using the publish/subscribe features on a large site with lots of instances?
Re: Discover Meteor
#40This looks fantastic. I am considering a purchase. Just curious, why didn't you use meteor to make discovermeteor.com?
meteor is not to build static web sites. Its for build Single Page Apps.
A static page is the simplest form of website. It is trivial to build a static page using Meteor. I hoped one of the authors would tell us why they chose not to dogfood on the marketing page for a book on Meteor.