My book, Rock and Roll with Ember.js, is now live!

18 February 2015

I started writing my book, Rock & Roll with Ember.js, on July 18, 2014, exactly 7 months ago (More precisely, I prepared some drafts from early chapters most of which I ended up rewriting before that, but who doesn't like a good story?).

Today, I am extremely happy to announce that the book is available for purchase!

Tame the dreaded Ember.js learning curve

Ember is said to be hard to learn. Developers who are new to the framework hit a wall and can't easily find out how all the pieces fit together.

My own experience tells me that Ember has a small number of core concepts that you have to grok to be able to tame the learning curve. Once you understand these key ideas behind the framework's design, you will fly over that wall and see the green meadow filled with flowers and bunnies.

You will build Ember applications with confidence and - if you are like me - you will love building them.

Read it and build it!

My book also has a concept, and a very pragmatic one at that.

In the book, we are building an application, chapter by chapter. As we progress, we are adding new features to the application, introducing new Ember concepts that are needed for implementing the feature.

When a list of bands need to be displayed alongside with the songs of the selected band, we reach for nested routes. When we need a widget that displays stars for the songs, we introduce components. When we want to show the user that loading data from the backend is in progress, we learn about loading routes.

Set List

The book currently has the following chapters:

  1. Introduction to Ember.js
  2. Ember CLI
  3. Templates and data bindings
  4. Routing
  5. Nested routes
  6. Actions
  7. Components
  8. Controllers
  9. Advanced routing
  10. Talking to a backend - with Ember Data
  11. Testing
  12. Sorting and searching with query params
  13. Loading and error routes
  14. Helpers
  15. Getting ready for Ember 2.0

I say 'currently' because I will definitely have to change some chapters as Ember evolves (To give an example, Controllers will probably become Routable components).

A reference book and a reference application

Ember moves rapidly towards version 2.0. As each minor version is released, it brings new syntaxes and deprecates old ones. Even though the Ember Core team takes extreme care to ensure a smooth upgrade process, it is easy for an application to lag behind, having a few deprecations here and there and not using the shiny new tools.

The motto of the Ember 2.0 roadmap is "Stability without Stagnation", that old syntaxes and practices should vanish gradually, giving ample time for developers to update their applications. At the same time, Ember should not stagnate, it should introduce new features.

I adhere to this motto, but, more importantly, my book does, too.

I want the book and the Rock & Roll application to be up-to-date with the latest stable Ember version and not have any of the deprecations. What that means in practice is that if you buy one of the packages, you will most likely get book updates after each 1.x release. And at no extra cost to you until 2.0 ships!

A bonus deal you will definitely like

When you buy one of the packages you also get access to an awesome deal from Divshot, a company that provides static hosting for your Ember apps.

You get 3 months free of their Fleet plan, a $150 value.

The "New Beginning" tour

Wait, there is more! To celebrate that the book has finally seen the light of day, there is a 25% discount on all packages.

This offer expires on Sunday, February 22, at 23:59 PST, so grab yours now!

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to all of you who have pushed me through the finish line, either by praising my screencasts, blog posts and review copies of my book, retweeting my marketing tweets, giving valuable feedback that made the book better or simply by pointing out typos in the text.

I would also like to thank you to the Ember Core team whose relentless work makes Ember better every day. You are putting so much time in, it's almost insane. It's kinda obvious but without your contributions, this book would not exist.

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