Rock and Roll with Ember.js 2.5 is released

03 May 2016

I published a new version of the Rock and Roll Ember.js book, and the related application. It now runs on Ember, Ember Data and Ember CLI ~2.5.0.

More importantly, I made other improvements that serve to improve clarity and reduce the number of new things the reader has to absorb at each step, which I think is hugely important for an efficient, non-frustrating learning process.

  1. The biggest change (and simplification) is that I no longer sort the songs from the get-go. To do so, I needed to use the SortableMixin and later, when that was gone, an ArrayProxy. This resulted in other simplifications, like not having to use (and maintain) a jsbin for that code snippet that used the "global" Ember application building style and iterated on the magical sortedContent property.

  2. I also improved the flow of the Components chapter, rearranged some sections, explained a few things that help comprehension and moved a few things that only add to the learning burden.

  3. I created an Appendix, called "Encore" to further the rock analogy. I felt (and got matching feedback) that on some occasions there were too many "sidebar" explanations (called "Backstage" sections in the book), that either weren't important enough to warrant holding up the flow of explanation or lacked context. I moved these sections into the Encore where interested readers can learn about these topics when they see fit.

  4. Last, but not least, I went through the book and built the application from scratch to see that everything still works. I also applied git tags at the end of each chapter so that readers of the middle- and high-tier packages can skip to each chapter in the code in a very simple way, using git checkout.

(There were some other changes, the whole list of which you can see here.)

This is the most significant update since I published the Ember 2 version of the book last October and I believe following the book (and the building of the app) became even easier.

If this piqued your interest, you can download a sample chapter below.

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