Tag: Backbone

Rapid Prototyping with JS is out!

Rapid Prototyping with JS is a hands-on book which introduces you to rapid software prototyping using the latest cutting-edge web and mobile technologies including NodeJS, MongoDB, BackboneJS, Twitter Bootstrap, LESS, jQuery, Parse.com, Heroku and others.

The Book is on LeanPub

Rapid Prototyping with JS is a hands-on book which introduces you to rapid software prototyping using the latest cutting-edge web and mobile technologies including NodeJS, MongoDB, BackboneJS, Twitter Bootstrap, LESS, jQuery, Parse.com, Heroku and others.

The book has 84 pages (in PDF format) or 13,616 words to be precise, step-by-step set-up, best practice advices, web development overview, 11 code examples (also available ready-to-go in GitHub repository azat-co/rpjs), flexible pricing ($9.99–19.99).

Order your copy of Rapid Prototyping with JS at LeanPub: leanpub.com/rapid-prototyping-with-js.

Rapid Prototyping with JS
Rapid Prototyping with JS: Learn how to build web and mobile apps using JavaScript and Node.js

LeanPub platform allows readers to receive infinite future updates (current version of the book is 0.3) and read the book in the most popular digital formats: PDF, ePub/iPad, MOBI/Kindle. The PDF version has footnote links which make it suitable for printing.

Download a free sample at samples.leanpub.com/rapid-prototyping-with-js-sample.pdf.

What Readers Say

Rapid Prototyping with JS is being successfully used at StartupMonthly as a training manual. Here are some of our trainees’ testimonials:

“Thanks a lot to all and special thanks to Azat and Yuri. I enjoyed it a lot and felt motivated to work hard to know these technologies.” — Shelly Arora

“Thanks for putting this workshop together this weekend… what we did with Bootstrap + Parse was really quick & awesome.” — Mariya Yao

“Thanks Yuri and all of you folks. It was a great session – very educative, and it certainly helped me brush up on my Javascript skills. Look forward to seeing/working with you in the future.” — Sam Sur

Who This Book is For

The book is designed for advanced-beginner and intermediate level web and mobile developers: somebody who has just started programming and somebody who is an expert in other languages like Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Java and wants to learn JavaScript and Node.js.

Rapid Prototyping with JS, as you can tell from the name, is about taking your idea to a functional prototype in the form of a web or a mobile application as fast as possible. This thinking adheres to the Lean Startup methodology. Therefore, this book would be more valuable to startup founders, but big companies’ employees might also find it useful, especially if they plan to add new skills to their resume.

Prerequisite

Mac OS X or UNIX/Linux systems are highly recommended for this book’s examples and for web development in general, although it’s still possible to hack your way on a Windows-based system.

Contents

Acknowledgment

Introduction

  1. Who This Book is For
  2. Prerequisite
  3. What to Expect
  4. Notation
  5. Web Basics: Hyper Text Markup Language, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript
  6. Agile Methodologies: Scrum, Test-Driven Development, Continuous Deployment, Paired Programming
  7. Node.js
  8. NoSQL and MongoDB
  9. Cloud Computing
  10. HTTP Requests and Responses
  11. RESTful API

Getting Started

  1. Development Folder
  2. Browsers
  3. IDEs and Text Editors
  4. Version Control Systems
  5. Local HTTP Servers
  6. Database: MongoDB
  7. Other Components: NodeJS, jQuery, LESS
  8. SSH Keys
  9. GitHub
  10. Windows Azure
  11. Heroku
  12. Cloud9

Building Front-End Application

  1. JSON
  2. AJAX
  3. Cross-Domain Calls
  4. jQuery
  5. Twitter Bootstrap
  6. LESS
  7. BackboneJS
  8. Example of using Twitter REST API and jQuery
  9. Parse.com
  10. Message Board with Parse.com
  11. Message Board with Parse.com: REST API and jQuery version
  12. Pushing to GitHub
  13. Deployment to Windows Azure
  14. Deployment to Heroku
  15. Message Board with Parse.com: JavaScript SDK and BackboneJS version
  16. Deploying Message Board to PaaS
  17. Enhancing Message Board
  18. Building Back-End Application

Building “Hello World” in NodeJS

  1. NodeJS Core Modules
  2. Node Package Manager
  3. Deploying “Hello World” to PaaS
  4. Deploying to Windows Azure
  5. Deploying to Heroku
  6. Message Board: Run-Time Memory version
  7. Test Case for Message Board
  8. MongoDB Shell
  9. MongoDB Native Driver
  10. MongoDB on Heroku: MongoHQ MongoHQ URL
  11. BSON
  12. Message Board: MongoDB version

Putting it All Together

  1. Different Domain Deployment
  2. Changing Endpoints
  3. Message Board Application
  4. Deployment
  5. Same Domain Deployment

Further Reading

About the Author

Order your copy of Rapid Prototyping with JS at LeanPub: leanpub.com/rapid-prototyping-with-js.

This website is not intended for use with JavaScript disabled

I’m working on materials for technical workshop. The topic is “Rapid Prototyping with JavaScript”. It is mostly about jQuery, Backbone, AJAX, RESTful APIs, NodeJS and MongoDB. So a lot of JavaScript on a client side and today I was asked a question by curious friend who saw my frequent updates about the event on Facebook:

“What about users who has JavaScript disabled?”

The questions made my smile and I intuitively answered:

“It’s 2012, right? The number of such users must be insignificant”.

And later I proved to be right — only 2% of Yahoo.com users have JavaScript disabled.

Another article shows why Yahoo.com data is a good source. It has almost all of the countries covered so we can get average numbers and numbers per each country.

But I wanted to analyze the change. Just about 5 years ago companies seriously considered not to innovate AJAX-y way so they can please non-JavaScript users. Now, I barely hear about such non-sense. Even the opposite is true – startups limit their environments to only WebKit browsers. What happened to that attitude? How did that happened? One theory is that Chrome and Firefox became more popular and an update to the newer and faster versions became just a click away or even automatic in most (default) cases. JavaScript de-facto became a web standard. Not using JS is a misfit.

I can’t imagine my life without Google Docs, GMail, Facebook chat and other wonderful things which are brought to us but small scripting language which started in 1995 at Netscape as a way to make text blink if not for the XMLHTTPRequest object. Brilliant minds even overcame cross-origin limitation with dynamically injecting script tags into to DOM. This technique is known as JSONP. But that is me — sort of advanced user.

Just a few days ago Adobe announced on 5th anniversary of iPhone release, which never supported Adobe Flash, that they will discontinue support of Flash plug-in in new Android 4.1, Jelly Bean. This event completes triumph of JavaScript as cross platform tool for web and mobile development.

For those unfortunate people (2% of Yahoo.com users) and search engine bots I must remember to put noscript into my HTML:

<noscript>
    This website is not intended for use with JavaScript disabled.
    Unless you are a googlebot, telnet or i486-PC user, please go get the latest version of Chrome.
</noscript>

One side note: mission critical applications without control over clients’ environment, corporate and government organizations which must try to server all users still have to take into account a lot of things which consumer facing and startup companies could get away with. Being section 508 complaint also falls into this category.