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Meteor in Action

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49 pointsperlmonkey24 comments

Hey, just thought I'd give my 2 cents in case you're interested. I was really impressed with the landing page, and the buy it now while it's in development method. I'm learning Meteor now, and I've been using Discover Meteor as my go-to book resource, but I'm always interested in more.

However, I'm not sure the first chapter is going to be your main selling point to end users. It's the introductory chapter, that goes over the history of Meteor, and what Meteor is. That's not the chapter that will sell me on a new book, I don't know yet how you intend to teach different programming concepts, or how you introduce how to actually use the framework. It might be of more interest to people if it was the second chapter maybe?

I'm interested, but not quite sold yet personally.

We are absolutely interested in feedback like this, keep it coming!

Indeed the first chapter is tough - we learned that through various iterations with many reviewers. Eventually we decided to just introduce you and skip the meta talk about methods and stuff. That should be in the "Welcome" passage before the actual chapter (included in chapter 1 - free download). If you didn't find the argument to let you know whether or not the book is for you we might have to refine this section and bring out our main points more.

Personally I am not convinced a starting chapter that told you how the book is going to teach you things would help that much with deciding whether you'd be comfortable with said book. It might be much more helpful to have a more advanced chapter as a free read oftentimes.

Eventually Meteor in Action will be a printed book as well, so that theoretically you will be able to browse through all chapters in a book store of your choice. Always assuming they carry Manning book, of course :)

What if you put a small excerpt of each chapter? or, maybe just a TOC (I didn't see that on site)

This would solve what buyer wants without giving all your content away

The TOC is available on the Manning site (where you buy the book). plus all chapters that are already available have "AVAILABLE" behind the chapter heading.

I appreciated the broad overview and rationale for using Meteor in the introduction. Well laid out, well written. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book -- the best of luck with it.

Personally worked on a few tech books (150+) and everyone wants to do an introduction chapter but how many people buy a book without knowing the history or Wikipedia level info of the tech?

Jump in faster I say.

Site is extremely well done. Is that something advocated by Manning or a personal thing?

Thanks for the compliments - it's a personal site, not officially run by Manning.

Once you read the book, the docs and have built something I recommend checking out the source code too. It's very readable.

https://github.com/meteor/meteor

I've checked out the packages, the ddp, the binary json stuff, etc it's all in there. Except for all the var self = this; stuff, I quite like it. They have really smart people over there.

What would a better alternative be for `var self = this` ? I use it all the time, never thought of it as an anti-pattern as long as it's only declared where you actually need it.

> What would a better alternative be for `var self = this` ?

    function foo(){};
    setTimeout(foo.bind(this),1000);

That being said, I'm not entirely crazy about that method as well.

A billion binds on every nested function you see. It's gross :)

That's one of the most engaging landing pages I've ever seen for a book. Sadly, once it went through to a sign-up wall for me to download the first chapter free, I gave up. Had there been a direct download link, I would have still been interested.

You don't need to sign up.

http://manning.com/hochhaus/Meteor_MEAP_CH01.pdf

Thanks for the feedback. I actually know much more about programming than about creating conversions and landing pages, so I am happy to make the site more accessible.

tl;dr Link is now directly at the PDF for chapter 1.

It's meteor! Their marketing department want your email desperatly ;)

Hahaha, have you seen their website? If there is one thing Meteor needs to improve big time, it would be marketing!

I'm glad to see growing Meteor ecosystem.

Judging from first few pages, looks like a decent book.

I'm intrigued by the picture on the front. I know Manning has a lot of covers like this but I'm intrigued what this particular chap is/is doing? Professional arm wrestler?

Manuel Schoebel has a strong presence in the Meteor community and many insightful blog posts. I'm confident this book is going to deliver.

Great guys, can't wait to see a finished copy of this book! Seems like the books are exploding lately, right before 1.0 is about to drop.

Good timing!

I have seen both Manuel and Stephan being very active in the community! They also organize Meteor meetups in Germany, Cologne.

Yes, they are. I know both personally. They love Meteor and know how to explain stuff in an easy and concise way.

We invited them over to our first Meteor Meetup in Düsseldorf, Germany :)

http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-Dusseldorf/

Can't wait to read their book!

Meteor is a joy to work in

nice guys! keep up the good work :)

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