Discover Meteor
discovermeteor.com
discovermeteor.com
The Crux of the Matter:
Coming from Node.js/Backbone.js/Express.js, I was pleasantly shocked and surprisingly inspired by how pleasurable and productive it is to develop with Meteor. I am not sure I feel this way about any other web-dev technology besides jQuery. Meteor is so awesome that it makes the book easy to get through and fun to learn from (the book is a web app, a book, and a tutorial in one; it is more than just a book, hence my use of the word “use” instead of “read”).
The book covers most of the big Meteor concepts with example code and it guides you along as you build the Microscope web app—a "real world" application you can deploy and actually use. You will learn so much and get through the book so quickly that you will want to develop your own web app with Meteor in an instant. Be warned: You will be giddy with excitement at how easy it is to get stuff done with Meteor. Using Meteor is analogous to using an iPhone for the first time after using one of those "smartphones" [1] that were available prior to the launch of the iPhone.
The alternative to using this book is to learn Meteor by painstakingly browsing and reading the thorough (but not necessarily logically organized for structured learning) Meteor docs. Forget finding a proper "Getting Started with Meteor" tutorial; they are outdated and lack depth. The book summarizes some of the important Meteor concepts in a logical, succinct, and exemplary manner, with hands-on implementation.
There are some specific Meteor core concepts that the book either doesn't cover or only discusses briefly, like eJSON, Deps, Custom Reactivity, and cursor.observe (similar to Backbone's model.on events). But fortunately, Chris Maher does an excellent job covering these topics in depth on EventedMind.com [2]. Therefore, I highly recommend the book along with frequent visits to EventedMind.com to get a thorough understanding of Meteor.js, so you can confidently start building Meteor apps straightaway.
It is worth noting that the book's format (a web app with comments, videos, frequent updates, and the main Microscope tutorial, in addition to PDF and eBook copies of the book) is groundbreaking and must be celebrated. Every book on any web development topic should be published in this manner. Authors take note.
Background: I am the dude blogging at http://javascriptissexy.com/ and I am a Frontend Developer (JavaScript Guru). Incidentally, I will likely write a detailed blog post about Meteor ("How to Learn Meteor Properly," perhaps) in a few weeks, after I develop my first Meteor app.
[1] http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/sanyo-katana-6600-black/...
If you're thinking about getting into Meteor, you should definitely grab a copy. It's a really easy read that teaches you a lot.
Oh, and Meteor is sexy, I'm glad you're a fan Richard. I'm a big fan of your site and can't wait to see you get engulf in the Meteor hysteria. :)
There will be Meteor hysteria for sure, but I don't know if it will happen so soon, although this book will help quite a bit.
Thanks for the wonderful compliment and encouragement, laughfactory. I am very happy that my blog is making a difference. Good luck with your learning.
Your recommendation for this book is all that I needed to convince me to take the leap (once I've got the fundamentals down, of course). Thanks for your recommendation and guidance. You've done a great deal to make me feel like I'm meaningfully progressing to a state of professional competency.
It appears that you have the passion and determination to follow through with learning JS and then Meteor. You can skip Node.js/Express.js/Backbone.js and go straight to Meteor, if your goal is to develop modern web applications with JS soon (without the lengthy time needed to learn all the libraries and frameworks needed to put a full Node.js app together).
'npm install async' becomes 'mrt add meteor-async' ...
Sometimes you have to do a little configuration work to get off the shelf NPM packages settled nicely with Fibers; but its not a huge deal and almost every day someone else will turn npm-somePackage into meteor-somePackage.
Discover Meteor (formally known as "The Meteor Book") is a book that teaches how to build a social news reader called Microscope, a simplified version of Telescope (Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4840032).
Microscope's code is a lot cleaner than Telescope's, and is also open-source: http://github.com/DiscoverMeteor/Microscope
Is it because there are no standards defined about testing Meteor apps or is Meteor being presented as a framework that does not need testing (hence, should not be used in production)?
As soon as we feel we've got a good answer for it we'll include something in the book to point people in the right direction.
So we should let meteor to do what it is best at :)
It is a truly nice touch to see a technical book sweat the design details.
But once Meteor stabilizes at 1.0 we'll consider a printed version. And if we do this, we'll also provide a discount for people who have already bought the digital edition.
I would really appreciate If the authors could send me a copy of the book at this email: ajob367@gmail.com I'll surely pay you once I have a credit card. :)
Maybe this will raise the bar into a whole new level of product. But I'm not sure I want to spread the news; its more like something I'd rather keep for myself as a competitive advantage.
You can't get it from reading the docs. So this is the best way to get started with Meteor. And price is too high but its worthy.
+1 for the book as a meteor webapp.
That said, I think the meteor platform looks like the "next big thing" and I'm excited to learn it from this book or elsewhere.
Time to start valuing books based on knowledge contained rather than paper weight.
People are price-sensitive. Their expectations--derived from pricing observed for similar books--is that a book's "retail" price would be somewhere between $20-$30. A book that's nearly $40 is almost unheard of. Additionally, this is especially true for "self-published" books. We expect them to be cheaper because their distribution/production costs are cheaper (or at least we perceive them to be cheaper) and we acknowledge that often self-published books don't have expensive, but quality-assuring, intermediates like editors. In other words, a self-published book is a much greater unknown quantity than one from a publisher which has been edited etc. Plenty of books from publishers suck, but an even greater proportion of self-published books suck.
If I was a web developer using Meteor, I imagine I would come to a similar conclusion about this book - with the exception that because it's online, the authors can update it over time.
Where did you get that? He explicitly said that "if the information contained is proven to be valuable and well-expressed than yes, I agree, $39 (or even $99 or whatever) is totally worth it." He literally said the exact opposite of what you are alleging that he said. Literally.
His shock was in regards to the fact that the offer no sample chapter (which they probably should).
I was confused by his phrasing. I thought he meant it was an unknown quantity because he had not read it.
The main point I was attempting to make is that some of those (perhaps a very small minority) interested in learning Meteor operate on very tight budgets. On a good month I get a $50 "allowance." Most months I don't get an allowance. This month my wife agreed to take the cost of the Discover Meteor book out of our grocery budget. So when things are that tight, $30 or $40 is a lot to swing. It's roughly 10% of our grocery budget (for context).
For those who make their living as web developers and have sufficient disposable income, I'm sure the asking price of $39 isn't a problem.
http://www.discovermeteor.com/sample/DiscoverMeteor-Template...
The issue is that the overwhelming majority of technical people don't live in SF, nor will they ever earn SF rates.
It's absurd that people insist on projecting the economic situation of an incomprehensibly small subset of programmers that are lucky enough to reside in a hot market onto the entire cohort of developers. Most people don't make $100 per hour, and even if they do, other aspects of life are quite expensive (car, house, school). I don't understand why people can't comprehend that some people make modest salaries or don't have limitless disposable income.
$30 isn't necessarily the world (and many people will certainly receive positive value), but it's still a hefty expense that requires one to gauge value. Asserting that someone is wrong to be hesitant about buying the book is presumptuous.
People buy things based on cost, and strive to preserve their money and maximize value. What is so upsetting about that?
Nearly $40 is a lot for an unknown quantity for someone like me who is convinced that Meteor is a big deal, but who is also learning web development from the ground-up. And yes, I should probably start with something a little easier for a beginner to rap their head around.
But there really are people like me out there who are interested in learning Meteor for whom $39 (or $30) represents a lot of money. I'm a grad student, working part-time for $14/hour, with a homemaker wife and baby. My allowance, when I can get it, is $50 a month. Yep, that's how some of us roll.
So maybe sharing that sheds some light on how and why someone (like me) might be price sensitive--even when it seems ridiculous to others who make a LOT more money.
That said, after getting the expense approved by my wife, I did actually take advantage of the $30 launch list price and am currently working my way through the book. The first 28 pages have been worthwhile. I like that, similar to the Hartl Rails Tutorial, it attempts to cover the whole development life cyle including deploying locally, to Meteor, to Heroku, and to EC2, etc. For beginners like me who really crave learning about the whole process, this is a boon.
For me, the issue is time: why should I spend time learning this framework, versus all the other frameworks that I see showing up a few times a week on HN?
If you convince me that my time is worth it, I'd pay $60 as easily as I'd pay $20.
Ember is a front-end framework which allows you to use whatever back-end you feel like to feed it. E.g., you could use Ember with Node, Rails, Django, etc.
Meteor is the whole package: front and back-end with a lot of glue built in that makes coordinating front and back-end easier.
At least that's the impression I get. I'm also very impressed by Ember--though it, like Meteor, is challenging to learn due to the dearth of learning materials.
This book is the second (as far as I know) Meteor book, and there's only one book I'm aware of available for Ember (Master Space and Time with Javascript: Ember).
So tmeasday, now that you're not busy any chance of fixing accounts-anonymous?
"Now that you're not busy" ... haha I wish! (or maybe not).
I'll put it on my todo list though, sure..