I’ve heard that EmberJS is not the best place to start if one is very new to Client Side MVC.
People have recommended to begin with Backbone as an intro to C-S MVC, and then move on to Ember.
The logic being that Ember comes with so much out of the box and it might be too much to grasp whereas some of the others are easier to get started with and understand the core concepts.
As someone who started working with Ember 2-3 months back, I don’t think there’s any prerequisite for learning Ember. My advice would be to pick a project & start working on it using Ember. I assure you, you will learn more about Ember while working on a project.
When in doubt, there’s always people on IRC or Stackoverflow to help you.
Backbone is totally NOT a prerequisite to learn ember. As @ankurk said jump and start building something. This is a great intro to ember jump in is the best way to learn.
The Ember community is super helpful too.
Good luck Mate!
I agree with @kiwiupover and @ankurk just dive into Ember. It could be helpful to experiment with Backbone, to understand the differences but by no means a prerequisite. But these days it seems everybody is comparing Ember and Angular. By comparison Backbone is a relatively lightweight framework the source is less than 2000 lines of code. The concensus seems to be that starting with Backbone you will just end up eventually recreating many of the things that are already baked into these larger frameworks. So why not just start with the framework you want to use?
Frameworks are all about conveniences. And every one is going to tackle common problems in a specific way. It can be helpful to try and compare frameworks, but probably don’t have to think of them in terms of hierarchy. Where one is a prerequisite for another. I don’t think the frameworks are designed with that intent in mind.
If anything, you should spend extra time learning fundamental JavaScript. That will give you the most value long term. Frameworks come and go but the JavaScript language is what really is the common denominator with client side development. Then when in doubt just take a stab at reading the Ember JS source code if you are curious about a specific feature. The source is well documented, and can be quite illuminating.
If you are relatively new to JavaScript I would recommend Douglas Crockford’s book “Javascript the Good Parts” as a good place to start.
One recommendation I have for getting started is to begin in jsbin. It just makes it so much easier play around and share the link here or stackoverflow if you get stuck.