Real World Web Applications

Great intro to Meteor, iBooks is a disservice.

I’ll start by saying George Mcknight knows what he’s talking about. He’s kindly uploaded dozens of tutorial videos which do a brilliant job of introducing the user to Meteor and getting you up and running on the platform. It’s great.

The project covered in this book should give you all the tools you need to make any kind of great app with Meteor you can imagine. However, the iBooks format really fights against you.

First, the book lacks any real editing, so typos, grammatical errors, and punctuation errors (unecessariy apostrophes mainly) are present.

Second, it wasn’t really designed, so images will look pixellated, sections may not be clearly marked, and it lacks a certain polish of other books written and then designed to look as good and clean as possible. Compared to other books coming out, notably Discover Meteor (which was created together with a designer), this book looks amateurish, which belies the great content.

Third, and this is pretty bad, is that you can’t really copy and paste the code. If you select the whole code block and try to paste it into your code editor, you’ll find that line breaks aren’t preserved, and iBooks inserts its own weird codes, quote marks, and a “the is an excerpt from iBooks etc” disclaimer every time. It’s possible to paste the code in line-by-line, but this become tedious for larger code blocks. It seems iBooks wants to make this as hard as possible.

In all, the content is BRILLIANT, it’s just that the iBooks platform doesn’t do it justice. I recommend not only this book, but George Mcknight’s tutorial videos on YouTube as well, along with everything else he writes on the internet. The price tag is significantly higher than other, more highly polished books on the same subject, but so far I’m happy with my purchase.