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A comment on Developing Backbone.js Applications.

Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by manishsharan on Thursday December 27, 2012 @12:36PM (#4974132)
I got the early release of this book on Oreily Safari and I have a rather low opinion of this book. I was developing a Backbone.js app wanted to use this book to provide insights but this book was surprisingly completely unhelpful. I was ( and I guess I still am )struggling with rendering components , item views and list views and managing events/models and struggling with router etc. I am not the only programmer with these issues; there are plenty of non-trivial question about backbone.js on Stackoverflow. This book has little to help one understand the internals of backbone.js or how and where to apply underscore.js . For some reason this book veers off into node.js development as if every one using backbone.js is going to wrote a node.js back-end server app. Thankfully enough, there are several outstanding tutorials on the web on backbone.js and the underscore.js libraries as very well documented and the demo app is also very illustrative. I purchased this book on OReilly Safari to support the authors but the book is a complete disappointment.
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by Homunculiheaded on Thursday December 27, 2012 @01:31PM (#4974430)
I can't offer much help with many of the other issues you mentioned but if you really want to understand the internals of backbone better I don't think there's really a better path than reading the annotated source [0]. One of backbone's strengths is that it is so minimal, and the source so compact.

0. http://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html

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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by smagch on Thursday December 27, 2012 @10:02PM (#4976215)
I wrote Backbone.js tutorials using HN search API. I hope my posts help you.

http://smagch.github.com/posts/2012-11-20-model-is-stateful....

http://smagch.github.com/posts/2012-12-10-assemble-modules-b...

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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by chime on Thursday December 27, 2012 @01:02PM (#4974283)
If you are working on a non-trivial application and it's not too late to switch, may I suggest: http://emberjs.com/guides/router_primer/

I love Coffeescript/Underscore/Backbone and have made many applications with them. But for large sites with lots of nested views, I prefer Coffeescript/Less + Emberjs + Handlebars + Bootstrap.

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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by will_work4tears on Thursday December 27, 2012 @02:16PM (#4974648)
Is CoffeeScript necessary with Ember?
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by dkulchenko on Thursday December 27, 2012 @03:56PM (#4974998)
Not at all. As a Coffeescript dev it's actually taking some effort to learn Ember with Coffeescript as all the guides and docs are for JS.
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by christensen_emc on Thursday December 27, 2012 @01:17PM (#4974353)
Check out recipes with backbone. I was in a similar place(past to do apps, but not ready for anything substantial) and I found it to be a great help. Truth be told, there is not a lot of good literature on intermediate backbone development and I think that's really hampering its adoption.
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by killahpriest on Thursday December 27, 2012 @08:38PM (#4976015)
Erik, links please!

Also, have you published that Backbone tutorial you were working on yet?

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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by vijaykiran on Friday December 28, 2012 @02:43AM (#4976912)
This? http://recipeswithbackbone.com/
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by ynniv on Thursday December 27, 2012 @01:25PM (#4974400)
Where's the good literature on advanced backbone development?
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by jongold on Friday December 28, 2012 @09:22AM (#4977736)
Partially agree. A couple of points:

- I like how he shows integration with a couple of different backends (Sinatra & Node). Makes it more practical and 'real world' than just 'assume we have this bit of JSON to work with'.

- As other people have mentioned, the build process as a whole is becoming important with frontend MV*

- Check out Marionette to ease the boring bits of Backbone. There's a chapter on it in Osmani's book now; not sure if it was there when you read it.

- The book is still not set to be released for another 6 months; Osmani's JS Design Patterns book was fantastic so I'm sure this will be great too.

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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by captobvious on Thursday December 27, 2012 @06:54PM (#4975731)
Mind posting links to those several outstanding tutorials on the web?
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by hhuio on Thursday December 27, 2012 @03:27PM (#4974897)
Try AngularJS :)
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by camus on Thursday December 27, 2012 @02:13PM (#4974636)
I agree it's important for book about client dev to be backend agnostic , and too many books on js clientside frameworks contains unnecessary parts about server side development with nodeJS.

However, nodeJS makes it easy to quickly build a thin backend for the purpose of making the frontend work quickly, furthermore , nodeJS is becoming a tool that is really necessary in frontend development , you often need a buildstep before deploying code on the server ( minif , concat , ... ) , so a little chapiter on node makes sense in my opinion ;)

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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by oinksoft on Thursday December 27, 2012 @02:56PM (#4974740) 

  nodeJS is becoming a tool that is really necessary in
  frontend development you often need a buildstep before
  deploying code on the server ( minif , concat , ... )
Certainly there are minifiers like Uglify that are Node.js packages, but I wouldn't go so far as to claim that Node.js is now "necessary" for frontend development. I'd bet an awful lot that YUI Compressor, Google Closure Compiler, even things like jsmin.c are being used much more than similar Node.js-based tools.
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by aioprisan on Thursday December 27, 2012 @04:52PM (#4975235)
yui compressor is deprecated
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by ojbyrne on Friday December 28, 2012 @09:23AM (#4977741)
By who? Genuinely curious.
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by ojbyrne on Friday December 28, 2012 @09:24AM (#4977748)
Ah, found it myself: http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2012/10/16/state-of-yui-compress...
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Re:Developing Backbone.js Applications by camus on Thursday December 27, 2012 @04:34PM (#4975157)
I bet people doing some javascript aint going to install java just to minify their script, nor ant to manage tasks , nor maven to fetch packages when you get everything with node+npm. If you do testing , and you should , you need node to run tests.
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