What were the most useful resources for learning Ember.js?

21

In the peepcode screen cast Geoffrey Grosenbach said he visited the Tilde offices and got to talk to the creators (Tom and Yehuda) for a day. I think the general audience could benefit from this kind of immersion.

Perhaps you could produce an “Ember JS with director’s commentary” video. Basically have Tom and Yehuda walk through the API docs and source code Class by Class, Method by Method. And briefly, explain the intent behind each thing. Tell a little story about each part of the code when you can. Perhaps up to a minute dedicated to each class or logical segment of code.

Some people learn better when they have a visual or audio association with an abstract concept. Helps the reinforce the memory synapses.

I loved the play by play stuff that peepcode does. Would really love to see more of that from the Ember creators. Bring on more people from the core team to discuss specific aspects of the source code.

Over a few beers it could be a really entertaining walk though of the source code.

Plus I hear Tom needs people on google hangouts.

https://twitter.com/tomdale/status/365606272256593920

Could make it a regular thing. Fireside chats with Tom and Yehuda. :slight_smile:

But seriously this kind of engagement would be great.

1 Like
22

When i started i landed on this page. Watched that intro video and immediately started building my own sample app. I started reading each concepts in depth on Ember Guide while i progress with my app. When there is a necessity to use model i noticed this warning on ember site,

WARNING: EMBER-DATA IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND UNDER RAPID DEVELOPMENT. USE WITH CAUTION!!!

So i restricted myself, don’t use ember data for modelling, just use arrays. That brought me lot of trouble.Where ever i landed everyone used Ember Data kind of approach in their examples. And lot of posts that i landed has outdated Ember approach.

Actually, i guess no one won’t like to watch videos when they are developing live projects. They need instant and clear solution. Stack Overflow is a great place for this. But i didn’t find much questions on stack overflow with Ember tag. I created 5 questions (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, Q5) in stackoerflow for my sample app . I struggled a lot to find solutions for my starter problems. Only hope for me was Ember API. I stayed there for long time for my app. Finally i succeeded with my app after 3 days of struggle.

I strongly realize that there is not enough instant resources on the web like stackoverlfow thread and good blog posts with up-to date information. I want to see some good simple examples with valuable information. But i really hate examples that containing code to fetch data from server like this $.getJSON('/blabla.php') and directly bind them to template. I love small apps that containing valuable information.

Okay. Here is my sample app. Definitely that would be useful for someone.
Ember Play

After creating this sample app, i started love Ember. So i planned to stick with ember and started following @emberjs, @EmberWatch, @tomdale, @wycats in twitter and Google Plus for updates. I started watching videos that are listed in Ember Watch to get more depth knowledge. And also, i am following AngularJS to understand how they have implemented the same feature that is in Ember.

I thoroughly love this video.

I’m not living in SF and i’m half way around the world from SF. So my only hope to learn ember is good blog posts and interesting videos, not meet-ups and conferences. And any beginner will definitely land on Ember.js website. So please keep guides and APIs up-to date.

23

I learned a ton just by poking around in the Discourse source.

Also @eviltrout had some great introductory stuff on his blog that was very helpful for me.

2 Likes
24

Agreed. What I was looking for when I first started was “clone this repo, run it, and let’s walk through what’s hapenning.”

25

First post - so many thanks for all your hard work, it really is impressive what you have achieved…

I’ve just started learning Ember, but am trying to approach it from a test-first approach, which may or may not be particularly masochistic… anyway, this is an in progress list i’ve made that might be of interest to others too.

I’d recommend the book listed first too, found it to be pretty easy to follow.

I’m still a long way from feeling confident though — Ember Data for me is a big part of my concerns, i’m feeling like EPF might be more suitable for my needs.

27

I would say stackoverflow.com and the Ember.js documentation. Although the documentation could a bit bether if you ask me. Lucky for me I’m doing a project with a development team of 4 people, so we mostly learn from each other doing a weekly talk on Ember.

And we peaked at the Discourse code to get an idea on how too apply Ember in certain scenario’s.

28
  • EvilTrout Blog,
  • The Docs (especially the API section)
  • Peepcode video
  • Stack Overflow
  • Boston Training
29

The Ember.js website, the TodoMVC guide, StackOverflow, Ember meetups, and the advice from the Emberists of my company tremendously helped me learn Ember.

These resources were supplements to my learning. I only began fully appreciating and understanding Ember.js when I started an Ember.js project from scratch. It’s easier for beginners to see the usefulness of Ember when they start an open-ended project by themselves.

30

The most helpful bit has been having someone nearby that has built a intermediate-complexity site using earlier versions of Ember that has a better understanding of the underlying framework. I, for some reason, have struggled a lot groking Ember and still do not feel comfortable I could bang out even a simple app without extensive googling and that’s after going through the Todo example and actually building an XMPP in-browser client with Ember.

For me, examples like the Todo app that take you through the thought process from design to implementation in an iterative way are most useful for learning frameworks like this. My problem with Ember’s example app, as has been mentioned before, is that the Todo app is way too simplistic to deal with real-life application problems you run into. I understand these tutorials serve multiple purposes (one being to sell folks on how easy it is to use) but I think more emphasis could be paid to building useful apps with it.

The Guides are OK, but sparse and don’t do a good job of explaining how it all fits together. It’s very difficult to read a guide on templates without also understanding how all of the pieces fit together. My suggestion would be with the bigger application tutorial to do things in an explicit way first to solidify the concepts of how templates, views and controllers all interact and then later showcase how naming conventions make that unnecessary. This is coming from someone with extensive experience with MVC frameworks, including frameworks on Adobe Flex which has a lot of the same concepts as JS (async I/O, event bubbling, data binding, etc.). I can’t put my finger on what it is, but there’s just something I can’t seem to wrap my head around sufficiently.

31

I used ember-generator. Now how did you compile the .hbs templates? grunt does not seem to produce any compiled code.

32

I’m using Ember Templates. It should be included with the ember generator. Do you have it installed?

33

No, its not there. Thanks, I will check it out :slight_smile:

34

Just now noticed these posted by @cavneb

Very useful, succinct JSBins examples.

35

@trabus don’t know how I missed ember101.com but watching those gave me the eureka moment when he said that routes were more like what other frameworks call controllers and controllers are more like what other frameworks call a model (loosely speaking). Whether or not his (and my) take on what constitutes idiomatic MVC definitions are right, I feel like this is what was really tripping me up. For those familiar with the excellent python web framework Django, they similarly monkey with the traditional definitions of MVC but make a point of highlighting that in the docs.

1 Like
36

@tomdale One thing I am finding particularly useful when I get stuck on a difficult problem is trying to rework in an isolated JSBin. Often times trying to write out the implementation helps reveal an issue.

The difficulty is that can be laborious to setup the JSBin.

It would be really handy to have a reference collection of JSBin examples that are streamlined for working through common problems.

What I mean by streamlined is setup as a kind of template with common stuff baked in, common dataset examples, common UI components, etc. Each JSBin representing a useful baseline to experiment on a specific feature or problem.

The reference collection could be curated by the community. And expose common patterns and best practices.

1 Like
37

Since no one seems to have mentioned it so far, I can only highly recommend @noelrap 's series of books (c’mon, it’s $15!) Master Space and Time with JavaScript.

I have heard of rumours of a fifth book, to round up the trilogy, on Angular.js.

38

Okay, now that somebody else has mentioned it, I feel like I can put up the link… Master Space and Time With JavaScript, at http://www.noelrappin.com/mstwjs – Book 4 is on Ember, includes getting started, building routes, nested routes, Ember Data, Ember-testing, with some more yet to come.

1 Like
39

I’d quite like to do a series of videos that I’d be willing to make public if there’s enough interest… (would just need enough money to cover my costs)…

If anyone is interested, I’d love you to like the link on this:

We could get some really good quality videos online to help people go from absolute nothing to knowing ember quite well…

I should mention - I’ve done like 4 already, but I’ll only put them up if there’s interest. If there are over 100 likes on that post, I’ll happily put the first video online on youtube for free and link to it and you can see if you like my crazy-attack-style of presenting things and my philosophy on learning/teaching things to new people. Hope so :slight_smile: <3

40

@vic_ramon 's Ember Tutorial was enormously helpful. It is the closest I have found to Michael Hartl’s famous Ruby on Rails book in terms of step-by-step thoroughness. Would be great if he updates it to work with Ember CLI once that is considered stable.

http://ember.vicramon.com/

41

The video link is outdated one and the Peepcode link also, can you please remove the links.