Book recommendation - Backbone.js Application Development
A few days ago, I bought me an ebook reader. I need a smart solution for the 2 hours in the subway each day. I just want to learn new frameworks or any other computer things. It was clear, the reader should at first support epub format. My choice was the kobo and I'm happy with that. But were did I get my ebooks from. Sure there are a lot of (free) ebooks in the web. But I want to support the authors and I can't write a critic review of a book I never paid for. Yes, I want to pay for my books, but I will never download books with DRM and install me any Adobe shit. It's very funny, many publisher have there own books without DRM and the reseller with DRM. But there are two publisher I did like very much in the last days. The first one is leanpub.com. You get good and also very bad books for mostly 10 to 20$ in all formats without DRM. A big disadvantage and also a advantage, the author can publish the book in a nonfinished status and you never know if it will be finished. The second Publisher is packtpub.com, a good known publisher from the old paper times. I like there instant books. Just 10$ and you get a more detailed tutorial I would say. And today I would like to say a little bit about Backbone.js Application Development from Thomas Hunter II.
I'm the developer from stone age
I did work the last three years very intensive on magento and also learned php with magento. Now is the time for new cool things and so I realized that magento and prototype are so old fashioned. It's like leaving the cave after years. There are so much new and cool ways to build a web application. One of these new ways is backbone. So I did buy the book and start reading.
What is Backbone?
For those how don't know:
Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value
binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions, views with declarative event
handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.
In my words, it binds DOM elements to real models in javascript. If you change the model, every DOM element related to that model will change. And all that communicates with a RESTful JSON API to your server. That is the main feature in my eyes, but there are also other cool things.
Review
The book starts with a "Hello World!" example. Mostly that's the boring part of a tutorial for a new framework, new library or a new language. But I like "Hello World!" examples. The author made it very well. It's not just a output of the string, he used backbone events to make the string visible. In the most cases, I don't just buy a book to learn a language or a framework. I also expect state of the art style from the author. The author did that very well I would say. If not, he made a comment and gave advice how to do it in practise.
I did know jQuery and used it very often. The author also used jQuery, but did gave you other alternatives as selector library. And for the first time I heard something about underscore libraries. The examples are build up very structured, you have to change that file, add that file, click here and after every step you learn how the changes give you the new feature. I never need to download the example code from the homepage. But a little complaint, I can't understand why the downloaded code just contains the finished status of the code. I see that very often and I can't understand why the publishers can't give me the code after every chapter or a git repo. Just one typing error in chapter 3 and your application don't look like the screenshot, but the downloaded files are just from chapter 12 for example. I guess, the pro javascript developer will never need this book and they would laugh about my first steps in backbone, but I'm a newbie with backbone and this book did help me a lot to understand the automatic magic behind the code. At the end, I'm very happy with this book.