Stoked On Meteor — Join the adventure with Discover Meteor
Note: this article is part of a series called Stoked on Meteor, the introduction and the syllabus can be found on this article: The Goal is to Learn. Enjoy your read!
Discover Meteor is the resource that takes you from scratch and teach you how to build faster real-time web apps. And it get farther than that!
Discover Meteor
The book
Complete beginners or experienced developers, no matter their reactions transmit all the same feelings : this awesome book has been the first complete learning tool that covered all aspects necessary to start building more advanced applications with Meteor.
One says:
The level of detail put into every aspect of this book is phenomenal. It’s one of the few books I own that is educational, asset-rich, beautiful, and turns something somewhat complicated into a fun adventure.
Another says:
The most impressive for me was the presentation of this book. The book is made to be opened alongside your development tools and provides an interactive experience for working your way through the examples.
What’s inside though? After building Telescope, a Reddit-like webapp distributed as one of the biggest open-source project in Meteor, Sacha Greif and Tom Coleman learned a lot of stuff…
And they now use it to show how to build your app from scratch.
Don’t hesitate too much if you want to bootstrap your Meteor learning curve, this book is a real jumpstart! By the way, even though you are a non-native English speaker, the book has several translations. Yeepi!
Discovering Meteor
The Blog
And the story doesn’t stop there, mate! Sacha, who is one of the engines of the Meteor community, has been writing articles about Meteor for two years from in-depth articles to tutorials and essays. Let me share with you my two favorites things about this blog.
The Encyclopedia, a series of articles which goes in-depth about major aspects of what makes Meteor so magic.
It’s the opportunity to understand more about the core concepts of Meteor, like reactivity, latency compensation, pubs/subs. The client code examples are assuming that you are using Blaze, which just got a new home by the way!
The Blaze to React articles are more than 10 videos to understand [how to transfer a Meteor app from Blaze to React. Steps by steps, we get to follow how Sacha makes the transition from Iron Router + Blaze to Flow Router + React on the app that hosts the Discover Meteor book.
It’s very interesting to see the evolution and to get to appreciate the differences between these two view layers, Blaze and React.
Want to discover React + Meteor within a familiar environment? My advice is to watch those short videos and to hack the same way one of your existing app!
Some questions for Sacha Greif
Meteor conquistador
On what have you been stoked on Meteor when you started?
The thing that first attracted me to Meteor was the all-in-one aspect. Instead of learning Rails, then Backbone, and then maybe adding a layer of jQuery on top, you could now run your whole app with a single JavaScript framework! I thought that was a pretty revolutionary and empowering idea. Of course, it also has drawbacks. But I feel like with the past couple releases Meteor is getting really close to striking the right balance between ease-of-use and modularity.
Why did you decide to write a book about Meteor?
At the time, there weren’t any good resources for learning Meteor, so most of what I knew about the framework actually came from Tom Coleman, my future co-author who I had met on the #meteor IRC channel. Writing a book together seemed like a good way to share all that knowledge with the rest of the community, and hopefully launch a profitable project at the same time.
Do you have new projects in mind to empower the community?
Lately I’ve been working on Nova, my React reboot of open-source Meteor app Telescope. I’m hoping it can become a valuable asset for the community, but even if it doesn’t it’s been a great way to learn a *lot* about React!
\o/
Thanks Sacha for answering my questions, you can follow him on Twitter!
Have you read Discover Meteor? Did it help you? Hit the comments and let’s discuss what you think!
If you like this article, please recommend it to help others find it!
