This looks fantastic. I am considering a purchase. Just curious, why didn't you use meteor to make discovermeteor.com?
It's worth noting that the book itself is in fact a Meteor app.
Discover Meteor
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Re: Discover Meteor
#52I 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 ca…
I am glad to hear you are a fan of the blog, Cory.
I am somewhat surprised you are all over Meteor already :), and you probably think the same thing of me :)
There will be Meteor hysteria for sure, but I don't know if it will happen so soon, although this book will help quite a bit.
Re: Discover Meteor
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the information in the book (regardless of page count) gives you insight into a new technology that you can use to expand your career, is $30 really too much? If you're a contractor billing at market rates in SF, $30 is one-third to one-fifth of a single hour's income. Time to start valuing books based on knowledge contained rather than paper weight.
" If you're a contractor billing at market rates in SF, $30 is one-third to one-fifth of a single hour's income. " The issue is that the overwhelming majority of technical people don't live in SF, nor will they ever earn SF rates. It's absurd that people insist on projecting the economic situation of an incomprehensibly small subset of programmers that are lucky enough to reside in a hot market onto the entire cohort…
@ruswick I agree. You said what I was attempting to say with a great deal more clarity.
Nearly $40 is a lot for an unknown quantity for someone like me who is convinced that Meteor is a big deal, but who is also learning web development from the ground-up. And yes, I should probably start with something a little easier for a beginner to rap their head around.
But there really are people like me out there who are interested in learning Meteor for whom $39 (or $30) represents a lot of money. I'm a grad student, working part-time for $14/hour, with a homemaker wife and baby. My allowance, when I can get it, is $50 a month. Yep, that's how some of us roll.
So maybe sharing that sheds some light on how and why someone (like me) might be price sensitive--even when it seems ridiculous to others who make a LOT more money.
That said, after getting the expense approved by my wife, I did actually take advantage of the $30 launch list price and am currently working my way through the book. The first 28 pages have been worthwhile. I like that, similar to the Hartl Rails Tutorial, it attempts to cover the whole development life cyle including deploying locally, to Meteor, to Heroku, and to EC2, etc. For beginners like me who really crave learning about the whole process, this is a boon.
Re: Discover Meteor
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
" 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.
Now I'm getting confused. I agree that it was an unknown quantity before I began reading it.
The main point I was attempting to make is that some of those (perhaps a very small minority) interested in learning Meteor operate on very tight budgets. On a good month I get a $50 "allowance." Most months I don't get an allowance. This month my wife agreed to take the cost of the Discover Meteor book out of our grocery budget. So when things are that tight, $30 or $40 is a lot to swing. It's roughly 10% of our grocery budget (for context).
For those who make their living as web developers and have sufficient disposable income, I'm sure the asking price of $39 isn't a problem.
Re: Discover Meteor
#55How does meteor compare to ember js?
I'm definitely new at both, but I'll give you the newbie perspective.
Ember is a front-end framework which allows you to use whatever back-end you feel like to feed it. E.g., you could use Ember with Node, Rails, Django, etc.
Meteor is the whole package: front and back-end with a lot of glue built in that makes coordinating front and back-end easier.
At least that's the impression I get. I'm also very impressed by Ember--though it, like Meteor, is challenging to learn due to the dearth of learning materials.
This book is the second (as far as I know) Meteor book, and there's only one book I'm aware of available for Ember (Master Space and Time with Javascript: Ember).
Re: Discover Meteor
#56Watched some of the videos (bought the second package)/read a chapter or two and wow. So much stuff in here that's been a pain to figure out via scattered posts and confusing docs. Go pick this up if you want to learn Meteor.
I've just finished chapters 1-3, and so far I agree: It's a concise guide to Meteor.
Re: Discover Meteor
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ca…
I am glad to hear you are a fan of the blog, Cory. I am somewhat surprised you are all over Meteor already :), and you probably think the same thing of me :) There will be Meteor hysteria for sure, but I don't know if it will happen so soon, although this book will help quite a bit.
Another huge fan of your blog, Richard. Your blog represents one of the single best locations on the web for excellent road maps for learning web development. It is immensely helpful to go through the material that you've already vetted rather than waste time and energy finding and trying the plethora of books, tutorials, videos, sites, etc. For beginners it's incredibly overwhelming but your site helps show us the path and put us on it. It's still a lot of work, but at least we feel that as long as we follow your recommendations we'll make steady progress toward our goal of becoming Web Engineers. I can't wait to read your upcoming post about Meteor!
Re: Discover Meteor
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think it is mainly for SEO. I don't think google bots like meteor.
Meteor can be made to prep stuff for search engines and other spiders, but the current solution (they admit it's a stopgap) involves PhantomJS, which gets into serious resource consumption for a static site.
Re: Discover Meteor
#59Just browsing through it, definitely worth $30 to me. Well written and explains Meteor perfectly for retards like myself. So tmeasday, now that you're not busy any chance of fixing accounts-anonymous?
Thanks!
"Now that you're not busy" ... haha I wish! (or maybe not).
I'll put it on my todo list though, sure..
Re: Discover Meteor
#60I 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'm still on your "How to Learn Javascript Properly" track, but I've being hearing about Meteor in passing quite a bit lately.
Your recommendation for this book is all that I needed to convince me to take the leap (once I've got the fundamentals down, of course). Thanks for your recommendation and guidance. You've done a great deal to make me feel like I'm meaningfully progressing to a state of professional competency.