Let’s Code: Test-Driven JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

Let’s Code: Test-Driven JavaScript

letscodejavascript.com

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Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript

- already raised $39,331 on kickstarter [1]

- charging 'early' subscribers $19.95/month, but then it goes up to $24.95/month [2]

Test-Driven JavaScript Development (Developer's Library)

- paperback or pdf for a one time fee of $32.62 [3],[4]

- Kindle for a one time fee of [5] (although the font size appears to be an issue [6])

- subscription based, along with 9 other books for $19.99/month [7]

- subscription based, along with all other Safari digital library offerings for $42.99

- if using the pdf, kindle, or safari subscription versions can be text searched

For a guy trying to learn JavaScript in his spare time, this one's a no brainer

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/188988365/lets-code-test...

[2] http://www.letscodejavascript.com/v3/subscribe

[3] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321683919/

[4] http://www.informit.com/store/test-driven-javascript-develop...

[5] http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004519O02/

[6] http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-content-search/results/re...

[7] https://ssl.safaribooksonline.com/subscribe

EDITED: hopefully paragraph breaks come through this time

I was thrilled to see this show up in my logs. I've been working on the screencast for months and months and I was thinking about doing a Show HN. Now I don't have to. I'm happy to answer any questions anybody might have.

Here's the HN discussion from when the series was launched on Kickstarter last year: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3977240

I wonder if you use any client side framework like backbone.js or ember.js. How do you make Client-Server communication? I hope you use websockets, so we can learn how to write tests with websockets. Thanks

I haven't gotten to that point in the series yet, but WebSockets are on the agenda, probably using Socket.IO.

The only client side library we're using at the moment is JQuery, other than test frameworks.

In general, the show tends to focus on understanding things deeply before applying frameworks and libraries. JQuery (and eventually, Socket.IO) is an exception because of how it abstracts away browser differences.

Oh, and we're using Raphaël to abstract away vector graphics differences. (In particular, IE 8 uses VML and the other browsers we're supporting use SVG.)

This is a great story for HN. It has current technology, a how-to slant, and it's a terrific example of how to put together a learning-driven web business. Great job, James!

ADD: I hope I'm not being too nosy, but I'd love to see some traffic and conversion numbers from you. I love the structure of this site.

Thanks! I'll share what I can. I don't track site traffic (but I can tell you that I've bumped Heroku up to 4 dynos to keep response time solid) but I do track media traffic, since I pay for that separately. I've already served over twice the video bytes today as I did all day yesterday. Those are probably mostly the demo video. [1]

The main thing I track is subscriptions, and free trial conversions. Subscriptions are up an impressive amount--proportionally about the same as the media traffic, actually. It will be interesting to see if the conversion numbers change.

Credit for the site design goes to Primate in Scotland [2]. They did a beautiful job with the design as well as CSS coding, and I couldn't be happier with the result. Any remaining issues you see are my fault. :-)

[1] http://www.letscodejavascript.com/#demo

[2] http://primate.co.uk/

Update: I've posted an analysis of the effect of the HN traffic surge here:

http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Analysis-of-HN-Traffic-Surge....

This whole series looks fantastic. Just subscribed, looking forward to the lessons and learning your approach. Thanks for doing this!

Cool! The free trial week really made it an easy decision for me to subscribe.

Missed the kickstarter but will gladly subscribe!

Thanks!

buffering

I have a geo-balanced CDN with 10Gbit connections in Florida and Amsterdam, with routing optimized to perform well in Australia and East Asia as well. Traffic isn't unusually high today, so performance should be excellent. If you're sure it's not your local connection, can you contact me (james at letscodejavascript) so I can troubleshoot the issue?

wwow..

wow...

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