Ember reading materials, including a free book
Learning a new concept or even a JavaScript framework can be hard. It’s even harder if the documentation isn’t that beginner friendly. Although that isn’t really the case with Ember, in my opinion, I still enjoy finding a good programming book to help teach me the concepts I need to learn and that will even help me build my first app using that new technology.
I’m still a beginner to Ember, but when I was just starting out, aside from learning from my instructor and the tutorials he created, I searched for a book that I could use to help get started. There are two books that I found and have been using to aide me in my learning of Ember, which I wanted to tell you all about today.
While some of the materials I found were a little outdated, one I settled on was called “ember-cli 101”. The book, now called “ember 101” is written by Adolfo Builes and helps you get started developing in Ember. It helps you build your first app, an app to help you keep track of items you lend to your friends, a bit different than the standard todo-list app and teaches you the main features of Ember CLI and how to use Ember Data.
The cool thing about this book is that it was recently updated for Ember 2.0 and continues to be updated regularly, plus it’s now FREE!. Although you can still pay for it to contribute, Adolfo said he wanted to make a stronger commitment with the Ember community and make it accessible to everyone. The book is also now released under a creative commons license so anyone can edit and contribute to the book, which is in the spirit of Ember itself, built by an open source community. The source code for the book can be found here. With almost 3000 readers already, you know it’s a good book to help get your started.
You can check out ‘ember 101’ here.
I wanted to mention one other Ember book that’s now available as well called “Rock and Roll with Ember.js” by Balint Erdi. I’m actually working through this currently. Although I only recently found out about it, the first edition of the book followed Ember’s journey to its 2.0 release. As with “ember 101”, this book also guides you through building a ‘real’ application to teach you all of Ember’s concepts.
Balint made the book extremely beginner friendly, starting with the very basics such as installing ember-cli and writing your first template and works his way up in complexity. It’s also pretty fun to be working in a book to build an app that’s Rock and Roll themed.
“Rock and Roll with Ember.js” is also being updated constantly so it stays void of deprecation warnings and promoting practices that are no longer considered idiomatic.
The book is a little more expensive. There are multiple packages that start at $39, there was a discount though when the new version of the book first came out, and the price goes up from there, packaged with other materials such as access to the source code in the book and screencasts.
Check out “Rock and Roll with Ember.js” here.
Whichever material you choose to help you on your Ember journey, know that these are both great resources and won’t let you down!