I read the official documentation, which is well written, but does not cover the big picture needed to tie everything together.
I watched the peepcode screencast, which is great, even if for me the pace could have been a bit faster. After that I was convinced I wanted to give Ember a shot.
I failed very early on, wanting to accomplish two things that I guess should be very common. But neither one is documented anywhere. And while I found a few answers on SO, those usually used functions that were either not documented at all or where the documented said they were meant for something else entirely.
The first thing was integration with server side authentication. The foundation was a pretty standard rails app that handled authentication. I wanted access to the current_user from the Ember App.
The second thing was loading a few models together with the initial page in order to save additional calls to the server. I do not even know where to look for documentation on how to accomplish this.
It probably does not help that Ember Data is a seperate project. Ember without Ember Data is no way near as useful as the combination of both.
Again, I really want to like Ember. I love Yehuda's work on other projects and some Ember features like data binding look awesome.
But trying to use Ember to write a new app from scratch that deviates slightly from basic CRUD gives me a headache.