Backbone.js on Rails (a book by Thoughbot) | Hacker News Reader

Backbone.js on Rails (a book by Thoughbot)

workshops.thoughtbot.com

50 pointsnwjsmith23 comments

In slightly more finished-product news, the PeepCode on Backbone.js came out this morning:

https://peepcode.com/products/backbone-js

Part one in a three part series. For folks wanting a quick way to get up and running, it's a great foundation.

Yeah, the PeepCode is awesome. Love their consistently high level of quality, and I'm a big customer. +1 to this recommendation.

We're aiming a bit above the level of their part 1, and assuming folks have read the Backbone docs, and recommending things like that PeepCode. I'm really looking forward to their follow-on content in parts 2 & 3, too.

Hey folks - Jason from thoughtbot here. We're aiming for a very collaborative format here, giving collab access on GitHub as we write the book using Scott Chacon's git-scribe [1]. I'm hoping to solicit feedback as we go, and make the book content the best it can be.

What do you think of this approach?

1: https://github.com/schacon/git-scribe

It would be good if the book involved a problem or app that is well suited for backbone and the book/code works on that app until the completion

Yep, we're big believers in hands-on learning and delivering code with this book is a big part of that.

I'm not 100% on the idea of one app for all the chapters. For books we've written and workshops we've delivered in the past, this has actually been more trouble than it's worth, and we ended up adding superfluous content in order to build a cohesive app.

We're aiming to have a code base delivered with the app where examples live, but the examples might not always cohere - we'd rather each example best illustrate its content.

I agree with this up to a point. Probably the best programming book I ever worked through was Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. It was great to learn a full workflow start to finish.

While I don't necessarily have to take the concept as far as Hartl did for it to work, I would suggest that the code relating to every concept/portion of the book is capable of doing something in and of itself, regardless of how small.

Actually the Hello Backbone.js tutorial is a good example of this. http://arturadib.com/hello-backbonejs/ Every page works on it's own and build on the code from the page before.

I love the gid-scribe idea, I am learning backbone atm and one of the problems is the changes in 0.5.0 seem to put lots of old resources out of whack by a few degrees.

I think resources should be paid for (I just bought the peepcode videos from a comment here) I would be mildly worried that $49 might be a little high for some, but then again I hope I am wrong. Previews are always nice to see, the first couple of chapters to get a feel.

Thanks! (And agreed on the 0.5.0 changes, just went through the upgrade on an app ourselves a few days ago.)

Definitely hear you (and others) on the previews - we agree they'll be good to have.

I really wish they would fire deprecation warnings when they rename methods and objects, rather than just letting it fail with a 'not found' error - which could mean anything

I love the idea of the book being on Github (pull requests seem particularly suited).

Are you going to have easily-downloadable drafts of the book though? or will I have to compile it?

We're figuring out the best way to distribute, but with git-scribe and our workflow, we can cut frequent releases to all the git-scribe output formats that will be available through the repo - we definitely don't require you to install git-scribe or the publication toolchain.

Sound like it'll work out?

Can't seem to complete the purchase. Wufoo keeps telling me

-- Credit Card * The transaction has been declined because of an AVS mismatch. The address provided does not match billing address of cardholder. --

If you're still having trouble, please email us at workshops@thoughtbot.com and we'll help you out. Thanks!

This looks interesting and would have helped us out tremendously 8 months ago. But, hey, better late than never.

One thing that looks like it's lacking is how to integrate ui libraries; specifically jquery-ui. Coordinating re-rendering of your views from updates from your models or events from other views isn't easy. A FSM for backbone would really help, come to think of it.

I have been working on a Backbone KVO API using a basic observer pattern. It is very early stages and the API is not yet sound (I think it is still a bit obscure for declaring custom behaviors) but I have a few examples of the direction it is going http://bruth.github.com/backbone-kvo/examples/

Is it possible to see couple sample pages?

Great suggestion! We don't have any on the site yet, but I'd like to add some as we're able.

It might be nice to see what percentage complete each area you list is. some 50%'s and some 0%'s? all 0%'s?

Good idea Tom - right now it's all 0%, just the table of contents.

I've been looking at backbone.js stuff for the past three days and couldn't find anything worthwhile besides cloudedit's tutorial and the docs. Just today i was checking on books. Talk about luck :).

Im interested in Backbone.js but I do only frontend coding, no backend, no rails etc. Would this book be good for me?

Sure, if you plan on working with people who do (on those sorts of projects).

Don't put yourself in a box though, what's stopping you doing both? Get stuck in :)

Slightly disappointed the book is almost entirely empty.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com