Recipes with Backbone.js
recipeswithbackbone.com
recipeswithbackbone.com
However at $24, you'll get a number of keen backbone fans - but you won't get all the folks who are interested in backbone, and spine, and ember, and a pile of other frameworks; it's no longer a small enough price for an impulse purchase, so they'll stick to free tutorials.
The same thing applies to lots of other online purchases - I'll buy a vaguely-interesting phone app for $7, but probably not for $15.
The price point where people switch from "cheap as my daily coffee bill" to "the cost of a decent meal" will obviously vary from person to person, and from country to country. But I suspect that $24 is over that point for a lot of people.
(me, I'll probably buy it - but I'll think about it for a lot longer than I would at $5)
I totally agree with you that we're outside the impulse-buy price range and we'd sell more copies if we charged less money.
However, our goal from the start was not to make a tutorial for people interested in backbone. Our goal was to make a more in-depth collection of great patterns for intermediate to advanced backbone developers.
Hackers are smart, they can read the docs and figure out the basics. We wanted to share our experiences with working with backbone for an extended period of time.
Our book is a great resource for people who would use backbone professionally and at $24, that's cheap.
Check out the excerpts, and read the reviews, play with backbone, learn it. When you're ready to bet your app on it, pick up the book :-)
xoxo ngauthier
That said, best of luck with the book. I respect that you have specific plan in mind.
Edit: Seriously!? Why am I being downvoted over my financial status? Please point out what I did wrong.
That seems like a more appropriate option, but it didn't occur to me. I don't mean to act like an ass.
However if my text books costed $24 I would have been insanely happy, most cost well over $100. So if the book is good perhaps its worth it.
The code is also formatted such a way that the codeblock splits into two pages for just a closing brace (page 44 - collection view)
For $24 I expect better typesetting. Right now it looks like a pirated OCR book.
The content may be great (I haven't read it) but to me a book is difficult to read if it is typeset like this.
I plan to take a week or so in the very near future to again focus on improving the toolchain. Hopefully some, if not all, of your valid criticisms will get addressed.
As an open source user, I appreciate that you have improved the tools. But as a potential reader of your book, I want you to use whatever tools necessary to get it to look good.
Even when compared against a non-professionally converted pro Git PDF, this books does not fare that well. https://img.skitch.com/20111216-enxfwjcgkgsu2pcndkcaimd3q.jp... The code block has no padding. In general the typography is not pleasant. If you look at the git book, the italics do not stand out as much as in this book.
Backbone documentation is presented beautifully. So when you are aiming to compliment it, the bar is also a bit high :) (Granted it is HTML but I do think a lot can be done to make this book more pleasant to look at)
I bet a lot of advanced backbone devs will also not buy it because of the price.
While the content may be of good to high quality, the pricing is a bit off.
Also, nothing about Jashkenas. Did the authors thought about asking Jash what he thought about it?
From the chapter excerpt, it shows how to include view into views.. which is already clearly explained in the todo example from the main backbone page. I mean, I've used backbone a few time, but don't consider myself an advanced or expert with backbone.js, and I've learned nothing from these excerpt chapters.
It seems more like an amateurish marketing splash page looking to test interested readers.
But then.. maybe the authors are really backbone.js experts and just not designers, and didn't one to spend money or ask a friend to design it for them (but why doing that if you're trying to sell something?!). And maybe I've just read an excerpt that I knew all about. And maybe Jash said something in the intro of the book?
One of my personal principles is that I value educational content and training very highly. It's a worthwhile investment - worth the money at over twice the price.
These guys have been thinking hard about these problems for some time. You can see a lot of what Chris has been thinking/writing about re Backbone and JS practices on his blog http://japhr.blogspot.com/
My recommendation: buy both, read theirs, then ours :-)
thanks @jayunit
xoxo ngauthier
Offer a money-back guarantee. If you don't feel you got your money's worth within 30/60 days, we'll give you your money back. I know that this encourages me to buy, and I can't recall ever using it. $24 is enough money that I think twice about it, but not enough that I'm concerned about being "scammed."
Also, a few of those recipes I wouldn't consider "after the tutorial" material judging off chapter title alone. Like namespacing and view templates which are covered and covered again across material from the likes of the PeepCode or BackboneScreencast tutorials. But again, that's just judging from chapter titles I haven't read it.
That said, it does seem very valuable but I think the price point is off compared to other books of that type, and other Backbone learning material.
Keep in mind Rails Recipes was written by the incomparable Chad Fowler and probably had five figures worth of editing over a much longer period of time.
Our focus from the start was to provide incredibly helpful and relevant code. If we had gone through pragprog the release would have been a few months later with less rough edges.
xoxo ngauthier
This is not a book for beginners, but if you've already got some backbone chops it's worth investigating as there are a number of chapters that have great insight into things you only learn after building a few apps with backbone.
Recommended :)
If its in the book consider another copy sold.
Have you already seen this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7328265/jquery-draggable-... ?
Edit: Appears to be fixed now
edit: fixed
I appreciate the time the people involved took out of their schedules to get it resolved so painlessly :)
Thanks eee_c & ngauthier!
Nick
ngauthier
There seems to have been a delay in Google Checkout itself earlier this evening. Some purchases took upwards of 60 seconds to go through.
Everything looks OK now, though. The most recent purchases were processed in less than 7 seconds.
Sorry for the hassle. No worries, though. We will make it right by our readers!
xoxo ngauthier
For example, in the TOC (errors underscored): http://recipeswithbackbone.com/toc.html
> Here is our _planned_ table of contents. Since this book has _not yet been released_ the order and topics may _changed_ in the future.
Not being nitpicky here. If I hadn't read the HN thread I wouldn't have understood what the state of the book that I'm being asked to pay $24 is.
One of the chapters that should be made available is the introduction so that we can get a grasp of your philosophy of instruction and what gap you hope this book fills. I know there aren't really any backbone.js books, but hopefully there's a more specific mission statement than "There isn't yet a book about backbone" yet
We are targeting intermediate / advanced Backbone.js developers. That is, you should read this after you've read the tutorials and after your first Backbone app.
The recipes are real life lessons learned from a highly traffic'd Backbone site. These recipes comprise what we have learned as we made the leap to the next level of Backbone coding. We hope they will help others do the same.
Come on, a link to 'click here to buy' page? I don't understand how this got to the first page. This is not so honest because the title is totally misleading. The link does not point to recipes with backbone.js. A more honest title would be "buy recipes to backbone.js", which is what the link actually point to.
Might be a great book, but this kind of marketing totally puts me off, I will not buy a product that is advertised with such techniques.