Full Stack Web Development with Backbone.js: Scalable Application Design with 100% JavaScript 1st Edition

Great book!

This book is extremely hard to follow, and is laden with errors. Even the sample code is not congruent. The author makes excessive use of the "if you do this" or "maybe you do this", which leaves the reader questioning IF they should do the following later to learn that instead of a "maybe you could write this" it should have been "you need to write this". Also, from chapter to chapter it's as if the author remakes 70% of the overall application plot of the book but leaves you to guess what should be kept from previous chapters.There's a lack of where to put what code in which files (a new file, or existing) and where they should be in those files.I've not been able to get any of the examples to work when I write them out from the book, and many examples don't work from github.I don't recommend this book if you are looking to learn backbone, or learning to make packages. This is an "OK" book if you wish to hunt and peck for little nuggets of information. But be warned, the context is extremely hard to get right.

Patrick Mulder's short (it runs just under 200 pages) book on Backbone.js takes you through the basics of building a full stack web application in JavaScript.Given the scope the book's coverage is broader than it is deep and it does a good job of touching onall of the basic components of putting together a fully fledged web application.My own background is as someone who has made a lot of use of JavaScript on the client side (including using frameworks such as Knockout.js) in tandem with languages like PHP or C# driving the backend logic. As such I found that this book, short as it is, gave me exactly the set of tools I need to make the transition to full blown full stack JS applications. I don't think I would recommend this to someone attempting to build their first web app. Some experience is required (this is noted in the introduction).Finally, I have to say I really appreciated the inclusion of chapter 10 on Automated Workflows covering Bower, Yeoman, RequireJS etc. These tools are all really pushing the JavaScript ecosystem in the direction of becoming a world class, professional, environment for software development. It's imperative that JS professionals are aware of, and make use of, these tools. This chapter gives just enough of a taste to get one going in the right direction.

This book really helped helped me to wrap my head around everything that goes into creating web apps with 100% JavaScript. NodeJS still hasn't even reached version 1, but there are so many different libraries and components that trying to absorb it all without a book like this to tie it all together is very difficult. I highly recommend using this book to guide you through the process. Backbone is an excellent time-saving tool that I use in the majority of my apps even if I am not using the entire Node ecosystem. I've been programming with JavaScript for a long time, but this is my first attempt at getting familiar with all the new tools that have been released in recent years that help with front end code organization and bootstrapping. My favorite use for all of these is probably all the helpfulness that comes from the asset pipelining. I typically hated getting assets ready for production for small apps that I didn't use a major framework for, but with some of the tools outlined in this book it is very easy to automate. This book helped me to wrap my head around those tools quickly and with confidence that I was using them correctly.

Not ideal. Too many extensions: why are we talking about all of them in passing only Cocktail? Backbone.attributes? Come on. Put them in an appendix. Not a very good introduction. Can't for the life of me see why understand the formatting and explanations in "Router Basics." Not the worst Orielly book, but it's pretty damn bad.

As someone with an intermediate level of JavaScript, I found this book thorough and complete. It helped me fill the gaps in my understanding, corrected some misconceptions I had and provided enough history and context to the new things I was learning. I recommend it if you wanna dig deeper in Backbone.js, or just extend your general knowledge of JavaScript.

I was really excited to read this book because, #1 I really like Backbonejs, #2 I really love Nodejs, #3 I was looking for a book like this to help me build a complete application using the JavaScript stack. Unfortunately, this book falls short. I stopped reading it because the code examples didn't work and too much went into the tooling which I am already familiar with. Too bad, I really like the author's blog and really wanted to like the book. It does have some good parts to it (no pun intended) Hopefully the author will update the code so the example work or maybe write another book that actually teaches you about building real world examples that work. Having said that, if you are totally new to full stack development with JavaScript then this book is a good starting point.

Good "up and running" introduction to scaffolding and deploying Backbone web apps—hits the bases across the stack, but leaves a deep dive into the details up to other resources.