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Comment by thefreeman | Hacker News Reader

I keep wanting to try Ember, but honestly, it drives me crazy every time. Why is there not a simple "quick start" that shows how to get it up and running. You have lots of good documentation but you skip over the most important part!

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Lots of respect to Knockout for making an interactive tutorial one click from its homepage. http://learn.knockoutjs.com/

I didn't really get rolling with Ember until I started to piece it together at a high level looking at Discourse's source.

Amen. I know zilch about ember specifically. But this kind of thing is endemic in the tech world (even more so on the business side of things where people allocate budgets to line items like "docs").

Seriously, if your product is a new API, don't even think about writing reference documentation until you have a 2-page "birds eye view" document that explains your jargon and metaphors to a new user. Without that any reference documentation is going to be useless.

Waiting for 1.X. I can't accept it in current state (ember-data is buggy and undocumented). Also it's missing essential pagination feature).

ember-data is a completely separate project that is still under heavy development. You can use ember without touching ember-data, and unless you are on the happy path of Rails with the active_model_serializers[0] gem, I would recommend not using ember-data.

You can roll your own light-weight layer, and Ember's object system will give you lots of rich functionality. There is also ember-resource[1] and ember-rest[2] if you want something a little less hand-crafted.

[0]: https://github.com/rails-api/active_model_serializers

[1]: https://github.com/zendesk/ember-resource

[2]: https://github.com/cerebris/ember-rest

> Why is there not a simple "quick start" that shows how to get it up and running

This is what I love about Angular: just go to angularjs.org and right on the landing page you find excellent live code samples and videos guiding you gradually into Angular. Besides, Angular just feels much more intuitive.

We know that a getting started guide is essential. It's a high priority for us and we actually worked on it today.

Yeah, I've tried to get into Ember a couple times now, and each time I end up ditching because of the documentation. It seemed sparse, and what document is up there seems like it's often out of date.

Does anyone know if they've gotten the documentation (including the guides) synced with the API yet?

The guides are synced with the API now. But I feel like you essentially need to read every section before you can get a feel for how to put together an application.

There was a quick start project I found at one point which looked like what I wanted, but it was not in sync with the latest guides / api so I couldn't use it. Not sure if that has been updated now, but there is no obvious link that I know of and I don't remember where I found it.

edit: here's the quick start project I was talking about. https://github.com/emberjs/starter-kit/ Unfortunately it doesn't look to be up to date.

It's not free, but Peep Code has a screencast on it: https://peepcode.com/products/emberjs

I haven't seen it, but based on the screencasts I have purchased, it's probably worth the $12

I bought it. Very good material, perfect for beginners. Worth the money :-)

I paid the $12 for it, and I'm very happy.

This seems to go against what the ember core guys believe in http://twitter.com/trek/status/302811479135092736

O_O

A quick start guide definitely does not "go against" what we believe in. At EmberCamp, we had a slide dedicated to improvements we would like to make to the documentation. The first bullet was "Getting Started".

http://cl.ly/image/0i3i0X3Q0y3M/Image%202013.02.16%208:59:07...

We think we have significantly improved the documentation over the past few months, but know we still have a long way to go.

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