"How to start with Backbone.js: A simple skeleton app"
first sentence:
"You need a solid knowledge of JavaScript, familiarity with Backbone, Ruby, HAML, SASS and CoffeeScript to find this writeup useful."
Feels like an awful lot of prereqs for a starter. I don't expect to be spoon-fed JavaScript basics, but I feel like too many Backbone guides presume some understanding of Backbone before starting with something that is supposed to help you learn Backbone. Just a minor frustration of mine.
Not only that; but I find the use of CoffeeScript to be distracting when trying to learn the fundamentals of Backbone (which isn't really more 'optimized' for development with CoffeScript, despite the fact both were created by Jeremy Ashkenas)
AFAIK you don't necessarily need to use HAML, SASS, and CoffeeScript in order to use Backbone. They are tools that you can "plug in" to your web application to make you more productive, but I think they deserve separate treatment. And you need a server but it doesn't have to be Sinatra or anything written in Ruby. But Sinatra is as good a choice as any.
If you're going to study Backbone, it might be better to just study Backbone, using standard HTML/CSS/JS instead of HAML/SASS/Coffee. That would simplify the prereqs a bit and make it a little more accessible. But on the other hand, if you're at the point where you have a practical need to learn Backbone, it's sort of assumed that you're a web developer and should already be familiar with HAML, SASS, and Coffee. So I guess it's a judgement call by the author.
I don't know a single tool in that list outside of tangential experience with Ruby. I've worked in some combination of Java, Objective C, C#/VB, PHP, Python and several types of SQL over the last decade. I would hardly call myself a beginner. It doesn't mean this tutorial isn't useful, just that it's only useful for the extremely small subset of developers who happen to use Ruby, HAML, SASS, and CoffeeScript.
Perhaps not. But it seems like the author added an unnecessary level of abstraction for parts of the tutorial. It's his tutorial - he can do what he wants ... but it likely slows, complicates, or excludes-from-participating-in people that aren't well-versed in his chosen toolkit of technologies.
i actually wish there were more blogs that assume this level of background. i know what backbone is, i know what it's competition is, and i want to play with nontrivial working examples without having to figure it out myself from the api docs.
first sentence:
"You need a solid knowledge of JavaScript, familiarity with Backbone, Ruby, HAML, SASS and CoffeeScript to find this writeup useful."
Feels like an awful lot of prereqs for a starter. I don't expect to be spoon-fed JavaScript basics, but I feel like too many Backbone guides presume some understanding of Backbone before starting with something that is supposed to help you learn Backbone. Just a minor frustration of mine.