This is an excellent introduction to Meteor. The book is short yet the content covered here is more than adequate. The author is a good teacher as well, incrementally introducing the reader to new concepts with a playful tone and he seems adept at anticipating the thought patterns and confusion points for beginners.Sometimes, computer science authors write their books too much like their code itself, defining all their concepts up front (the way they would declare and set values for all the variables at the beginning of a function) and then expanding upon each piece in the section that follows. This pattern is not best for the reader: it's hard to get into a rhythm with the author and results in having to go back to the earlier portions of the book or chapter to re-read the way the author define their concepts as they finally start to sink in. I personally appreciate it when an author tries instead to establish a good flow and introduces ideas dynamically, at the time when each idea can be most appropriately introduced and can be reinforced most effectively by the surrounding content. This author seems to understand this pattern better than most and it makes him a good teacher for it.What I enjoyed most about this book was the structure of the content, chapter by chapter. The book begins by trying to get you up and running with Meteor and building a simple application as quickly as possible, and its amazing how simple it is to get to that point! It isn't until the third chapter that you go through the necessary high-level discussions of the Meteor framework, the needs it addresses, the history of MVC-like patterns in web development, etc., and in most computer science books I believe you'd be reading through this stuff up-front, anxiously waiting to get started and see it in action. But this book has such a nice flow to it because discussions like these come at the appropriate time and have a reinforcing effect rather than leaving you feeling like "okay, get on with it and let's see some code". The latter half of the book then builds upon the earlier, simple application with more realistic looking UI design, C.R.U.D. operation implementation, authentication, robust configuration of role-based event broadcasting and database access, and finally to deployment. So you can definitely say the content here is covered from basics to basic tour of high-level concepts.It's hard to be overwhelmed by what seems to be a glut of JavaScript frameworks out there, but after reading this book I think it would be even harder for one not to feel extremely excited by this one. Meteor is a full-stack JS framework and streamlines many high-level patterns and technologies that you'd end up implementing by hand in many other frameworks (or at least be mildly challenged to gather them all together with existing modules). Web socket integration (in a publish/subscribe pattern) between your data-store (by default is setup for you in Meteor as MongoDb) and client-side JS, the ability to operate offline, single-command project creation, single-command deployment, automatic file watching (live reload), easy 3rd party package integration (again, with a single command), and isomorphic JS are all available to you out-of-the-box with Meteor. I suppose Angular is following suite with Firebase, but - as the author mentions in the final chapter - you can even integrate Meteor with Angular or React if you prefer them as front-end clients. It's almost as if Meteor can be the glue that holds together many scattered technologies and techniques you've learned over the years in JS and allow you to focus instead on development.

I'd heard a great deal about Meteor and discovered this new book from Packt. Such a fantastic introduction to an amazing technology. As the previous review explains an understanding of JavaScript is advisable but even without it this book provides a fantastic introduction to Meteor. I am still stunned at how effective this technology is and its ease of implementation. The book gets you up and running very quickly. I'm already planning to use Meteor within projects for my clients. This is another great addition to my ever growing Packt library. Highly recommended

I bought this book a few weeks ago and can thoroughly recommend the content. If you're familiar with other frontend frameworks such as AngularJS then this book will be really useful for you. There's a really good introduction as to how Meteor works as both a back-end and frontend framework - with a simple to understand MongoDB tutorial that'll get you working with databases really quickly.Further into the book there are some more complex tutorials where a more advanced knowledge of javascript would be beneficial to understand the loops, functions and checks that take place for validation of data etc. I would recommend this book in combination with other Node.js books to really get a grasp on what is becoming one of the most popular up and coming languages in the web industry.

I have Isaac strack's Packtpub video on Meteor, his Meteor Cookbook and now this, so I am a bit familiar with his teaching style :)There is no question that Issac knows his stuff well. This book is very good like his video and the cookbook. However, it is not titled appropriately. There is beginning material and then more advanced material mixed together. I have been working with Meteor for the last few months so I am a bit familiar with it. Without that knowledge, it would be difficult climb for a beginner as far as this book is concerned. But if you use this book in combination with other books and materials available on the web, then it is quite useful.As far as the code that comes with the book, it works fine with a few minor glitches here and there. But I am experienced enough in Meteor to work through them. I am not sure if a rank beginner can do that. My constructive criticism of the code is that it can be refactored quite a bit to make it clearer, but may be the author had a page count limit on the book or something similar.

I think the subtitle Learn to develop powerful web applications in minutes with Meteor is a bit of a stretch. This is a brief introduction to Meteor. It will get you started, but you can get a comparable intro if you just go to the Meteor website and do their free To-do app tutorial. It would be difficult to find a comprehensive paper book because the platform is evolving so rapidly. The best resource I’ve found so far is the eBook by Discover Meteor which has been frequently updated although it is currently only Iron Router and Blaze (no Flow or React).