Hi everyone,
I am new to the ember community, I started learning Ember.js (ember-cli) few weeks ago, and I am just wondering how much time did you guys spent to master Ember.js and becoming experts. and what was the difficulties that you met ?
Thank’s
I’m by no means an Ember “master”. On the contrary, I’m still working on learning Ember. The main issue I’ve faced so far is that things change very quickly. Most blog posts, tutorials and articles out there are outdated. I started learning ember writing all code on my own JS files. When I started to get the hang of it, ember-cli became the standard, and it added a bunch of new stuff I had to figure out (grunt, bower, brocolli, the ES6 syntax).
One other thing is that Ember is kinda “fresh” in the market, so there’s a bunch of stuff that is pretty trivial to do with other frameworks (front and backend) but there isn’t an established “ember way” to do it yet. It’s hard to find recipes for some tasks (and when you do, they are, again, outdated) and that’s pretty frustrating sometimes (Examples from my own experience: validations, authentication, loading model data into a select box, etc.)
OTOH, I was working on a pure JS project the other day and I thought “Man, this would be so simple to do in Ember!”. So even if it’s pretty frustrating sometimes, it’s definitely worth it. 
I’ve been working with Ember for 2 years. It took me about a year to feel fully comfortable with the framework. I find best way to stay up to date with it is to subscribe to the weekly newsletter. http://emberweekly.com/ It helps that the company’s I’ve worked for use it, so being forced to use it on a daily basis helps.
I’m on month 2 or 3 with Ember. I just recently realized I must have moved up a level because now the things I can’t figure out how to do aren’t within the scope of the Todo example! 
I do have this constant experience of as soon as I think I’ve mastered how to do something I find out it’s being changed/deprecated. There are many things it’s really hard to master because they either aren’t covered much on the interwebs or they covered incredibly heavily in the ‘old Ember way’. It’s also a bit challenging to find more complex but current Ember app examples around.
Depending on your experience you should expect at least six months before it starts to become really fun.
I’m on month ten now and getting pretty comfortable, able to build larger applications but every week there are new things blocking me. The Ember.js Slack channel is great ways to give and get help.
But it’s worth it. Can honestly say I’ve never had this much fun developing things. Ember takes it to a new level of because it isn’t everything. It’s what you need and it gives you some restrictions which I find very helpful.
Would also be very interested in what people found the biggest difficulties learning Ember.
I want to learn Ember.JS as soon as possible. Really a very good framework. I have heard about the functionalities this framework provides are absolutely fantastic. I would love to learn it and teach to others as well.
Hello,
I have been using Ember for over 2 years, since v1.0.0-pre.2, and it hasn’t been easy.
We do not use ember-cli. We use Visual Studio as the IDE and have built a handlebars pre-compiler and a bundling mechanism to deal with what we need since these things were not available in the pre2 days.
We have a rather large project that is a front-end to an integration back-end. Around 300 people on the project at any one time but that number includes developers, testers, and BAs divided up into quite a number of scrum teams.
Our first major hurdle was upgrading to v1.0.0 where it took us probably upwards of a month to get our code stable again.
We are now on v1.6.1 but an upgrade would require us to re-write all our controls into components. Components didn’t exist when we started and singletons were all the rage in the Ember world 
However, for an upgrade we’ll probably need a month or two just to get our framework back up-and-running and it would then require changes to all of our 300+ handlebars files. This would also require full regression and re-deployment. Our aim is to do this after our largest go-live scheduled for around the middle of July. My estimate is that we’ll only be stable again after around six months.
Seeing as how this system is used to manage around 8,000,000 customers (and that number could skyrocket) it is rather crucial that stability is maintained.
If you do not have these types of constraints it will be easier to stay up-to-date. We can’t.
So do I mind using Ember? No. Would I use Ember on any projects that I have a say in? Probably not.
That being said changes in some other popular framework(s) would also irk me. Apparently Angular v1 to v2 is somewhat of a challenge.
Regards Eben
I started with Sproutcore in 2010. I’m still not an expert. YMMV.
Just curious, what’s the product you’re working on? I’ve never heard of Ember used at that scale.
This is an internal integration project bringing together multiple back-end core applications across an integration server.
I don’t know how much I can divulge but Ember is being used at that scale.
Rather ambitious, I know
I have now spent about a year learning Ember. To be honest when I started with Ember I had a limited knowledge of JavaScript and as I began to understand JavaScript I became better with Ember. In my first 3 months I took a few courses
Code School : Warming up With Ember
Balint Erdi : http://emberjs.balinterdi.com
That gave me a really solid understanding of ember very quickly. Something that can be done within 3 weeks time. I just took my time. I also read the you don’t know JS series and the way I saw JavaScript changed after reading the short book:
You Don’t know JS : This & Object Prototypes
Beyond that its like learning anything else it takes plenty of pratice and iterating. I would also recommend picking up books or online lessons on core Javascript. Follow Ember in ember digest and stackoverflow. And pickup Javascript weekly to just dig in on all things Javascript. Today I fiddle around with the deeper parts of ember watch youtube videos on topics presented by the ember core team. But its a learning process to be a master at anything. I was pretty proficient after 3 months though.
@ artsmc88 - Thanks for the tip! I just joined that mailing list and got those books. Excited to fill in some gaps. The changes in CLI and ember shouldn’t be a big deal if you understand the core of it. Most changes are for the better : controllers>components — and feel intuitive.
Warming up with ember is at this point, a fun exercise, but - writing in script tags really confuses things now that the Ember CLI / 2.0 way is so close.
I hav eto echo this. I knew very little Javascript and most was due to jQuery. If you start with ember-cli it should not take longer than 3-6 months to really understand ember and sooner if you work on a project thats not a tutorial. I have been using ember(cli) on and off for the past 7 months.
I would avoid using learning tools that don’t use cli, as it will have older conventions and be a confusing for someone newer
I’ve been working in Ember full-time for over a year now and i felt productive after a couple months.
And i think that’s the beautiful thing about ember and it’s community - after a little bit of struggling you feel very productive and mastering it becomes not really important with good documentation. Ember helps you rather than you having to struggle with it in a short period of time. I can imagine that it’s difficult to get startet at the moment because all of the ambiguity around controllers, components etc that’s going on with the upgrade to 2.0.
Good luck with your learning!
Like any powerful tool Ember.js takes some time getting used to. However, the extra time spent is a worthwhile investment. Once you start understanding it better, your skills as a JavaScript developer will start to increase in leaps and bounds. You never expected that things could be so much fun. Hang on to your hat!