Yeah, I feel the sentiment. When I read this I was like "really? 5 minutes? Are we really learning anything other than how to follow instructions here?". But I'm in a bad mood so I have to admit I'm being unfair. There's a part of me that's getting a little tired of these kinds of posts because they're often disingenuous. You're really not going to learn or build anything of real use in under 5 minutes. It's definitely a cool marketing ploy for both Meteor, who get some exposure, and Mailgun who may get some new paying customers.

But again, I'm being unfair. While what I said before still stands, there is the fact that I doubt anyone expects you to truly learn the framework in 5 minutes. It's just supposed to be an example of how easy it is to get started. And it works I guess. I personally have never gotten much out of the whole "X in Y time" genre of tutorials but I'm sure others do. Because I'm not new to programming I prefer to take my time and build out my own ideas as I follow these things. So while I read them I'm not actually following each step. I'm just understanding how you get from A to B, translating that to other tasks, and using pieces of the articles as I need them to suit my purposes if that makes sense.

O'Reilly: Teach yourself xyz in 14 days...

Me: But...but..how does this all work? Why?

Harvard University Press: Why? That's us! Dude check us out !! The 600 page book on the top rung with no cool memes and 1980 typeface. That's us.

This isn't a "learn how to be a programmer" tutorial. This is a "look how easy Meteor makes getting something simple built and deployed".

So instead of the theory of relativity, how about using a calculator to do your taxes.

Fair enough. But this is still not teaching me much about actually writing an app in Meteor. It tells me to type the code in, not how it works or what it all means.

To use the calculator metaphor it would like saying: "enter 75345 + 3455 / 4, there's your taxes!"

I see. For me, a beginner programmer, this type of thing is really helpful in explaining what you can do with the language/framework and what the structure of build/deploy looks like.

Peter Norvig: Teach yourself programming in 10 years.

http://norvig.com/21-days.html