ember-cli 101 Book Review

Ever since I first heard of Ember.js (even before the 1.0 days), I’ve been wanting to learn it. But the learning curve of the framework always veered me off from it. Also, the lack of a real project to apply Ember.js to it was also an issue. Yes, we can rebuild the Hello World (Todo MVC app) in any possible framework, but the real learning comes when you start building a real application, with all the issues and edge cases it brings with itself. Although I’ve read a lot of blog posts, watched a lot of screencasts, tinkered with it, and nothing came close to the information provided in the ember-cli 101 book by Adolfo Builes. As ember-cli is now the official “Ember Way” (not to be confused with the book that is coming out in spring/summer 2015), I’ve realised it’s worth learning about, and using it to build great applications.

A warning note, if you are looking into Ember.js, and aren’t really that proficient with JavaScript, do yourself a favour and go read this four book series first: Master Space and Time With JavaScript by Noel Rappin. It will teach you the basics of JavaScript, and it also contains an Ember.js book as the last part of the book series.

In the book, the author guides us through creating a simple item borrowing app. The difference from all other tutorials is that the author has created the backend API for us and has different endpoints, as he guides us through the book. You will learn how to implement a medium complexity app with a REST (Rails active_model_serializers) API. Also, you will touch all of the Ember.js components, and implement them in your demo application. You will also get to learn the awesome ember-cli cli generators, which are a really nice thing, especially looking from a perspective of a Ruby/Rails developer, that is used to having those nice things.

Although I’ve learned a lot from this book, I still have to reference the Ember.js API docs for every complex issue. As I will probably have another blog post on learning things, I won’t write much of it now, but the gist is, you have to build 10 apps to be a specialist in a framework, or one or two really nasty ones. You will encounter basic issues when you are starting out, and some weird ones specific only to your project. But that is the thrill of our job, and we need to embrace it, it wouldn’t be much fun writing todo apps our whole lives, would it?

Back to the book, it’s a fairly light read, updates constantly, and as the author himself promised, it will be updated at least until Ember.js version 2.0, which is still in the RFC process. If you are thinking about learning Ember.js, you should definitely consider reading it. You won’t learn everything, it isn’t a silver bullet book that will teach you a new framework in an afternoon, but it will give you a much better start, compared to everything else that is out there. Also, consider that Ember.js is constantly improving(with a 6-week release cycle), so having an up to date resource, while you are learning the framework is a great thing.