Meteor Cookbook

After working through the online tutorial on Meteor, I wanted to learn more, so I bought this book and worked through it. I had mixed feelings about this book. On the plus side, it does teach a number of useful things about Meteor that are not covered in the online tutorial. Learning about Atmosphere, the library of Meteor add-ons, seeing some examples of using Iron Router for created multi-page apps, a more detailed walk-through of developing iOS apps, and simply walking through lots of examples one by one are all very helpful. On the minus side, I found far too much of the book concerned with integrating Meteor with other packages, without enough focus on the basics (e.g. how to do more complex queries). In order to keep the examples short and simple, the book takes endless shortcuts, such as using Bootstrap to avoid adding a few lines of CSS, and it has little or no naming conventions, and in general does not set a good example for coding. It gives the impression that it is all about quick and dirty prototyping. It includes essentially nothing on debugging, testing, etc. If I plan to do any actual Meteor development, I will certainly need to buy another book--this one doesn't cover enough of the essentials.The longest example in the book, "Creating a coloring book with the Canvas element," I was unable to get to work, even after downloading the code from the Packt website. There were error messages that came up, and this may have been my error, but the book provided me with no help in figuring out what had gone wrong, and I found nowhere to submit a question (other than his suggestion I post to Stack Overflow).On the other hand, I did enjoy Strack's breezy style. Being introduced to lots of packages, some of which I was unfamiliar with, had some interest. I certainly understand Meteor far better than I did before beginning the book (not hard to do). I wanted to like it better than I did. Perhaps if I had read a different Meteor book before reading this one, I would have appreciated more the specific things it brought forward.

Quick read to get started quickly.

The book is an absolute cookbook to learn Meteor recipes. If you are looking for book full of examples to learn how to do most of the things in Meteor, this is a great book. I would suggest the readers to have expectations of reading a cookbook and not whole app development guide. The book covers pretty nicely what it is supposed to be. Learn the core concepts of Meteor from Meteor site and develop some fun projects. Read this book then and you will appreciate it definitely.

I found this book to be a very good introduction to programming meteor. While it's not a deep dive into any area of the platform, it does do a good job of covering the basics of building an application. Well worth the $$.