Lets Learn Meteor

I am a 40-something man married to the love of my life, and the father to three amazing children. I have spent 13 years as a web coder, earning a living by writing web apps, mostly with PHP and MySQL. I've recently had some life experiences that convinced me to up my skill level and take on a few new challenges. 

Over the last 18 months or so I have looked at various languages and frameworks. At one time or another I have decided to teach myself Ruby and then Rails, Python, Java, and numerous others. Nothing really clicked with me or set off the spark of excitement I was hoping feel. A poor way to evaluate a programming language, but if I wanted 'boring' I'd just stick with what I am comfortable with. 

Then one day about a year ago (has it been that long?) I came across this blog post about a book called 'Discover Meteor' by Tom Coleman and Sacha Greif. I was intrigued by this new, reactive way to develop web apps. I read some more of the posts on the blog, played with Meteor a bit (it was at version 0.6.3 I think) and went back to my day job.

Maybe it was the timing, maybe I was having a bad week - who knows - but I didn't get overly excited about Meteor at the time. That all changed in December when I happened across the Meteor blog again and read a post titled 'Why web beginners should start with Meteor' by Alice Yu. The post got me excited to try Meteor again - and I got hooked. And have stayed hooked since. While I haven't had as much time to devote to Meteor as I'd like - I've certainly put in some hours. I've also stopped looking at other frameworks and languages - Meteor is it!

Here are the things that have convinced me that I am making the right decision to go with Meteor:

The community. I know all languages boast about their communities and how accepting and helpful they are, but the Meteor community has blown me away. I've had helpful email conversations with members of the Meteor team, Sacha Greif, and several other "leaders" in the young Meteor community, as well as people just learning to code for the first time. They have all been amazing. I was so impressed that I worked with Meteor's Jade Q Wang to start the official Meteor Boise meetup.

Discover Meteor. The best project based programming book I have ever read. Constantly updated and edited, the code works flawlessly and the writing is clear and concise.  It's the best $39 you'll spend on a programming book ever. I bought the $159 "White Dwarf" package and have enjoyed all the extras.

Meteor itself. It might seem odd to you that "Meteor" is third in the list of reasons why I am sticking with Meteor! Well, let me tell you something - there are a LOT of great frameworks out there and a lot of them do the same thing in different ways. Meteor IS unique and all that, but you could substitute dozens of names for 'Meteor' in the following sentence: "Meteor is an open-source, full-stack JavaScript framework that makes it easy to write top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time." See?

Still, there are a few things about Meteor that set it apart. In no particular order - it's built on top of Node, reactive programming, automatic includes, minification and concatenation in production, Meteor DEPLOY, smart packages, spiderable, live HTML templates, a great package manager, great documentation... I could go on for days.

So there you have it. I am turning myself into a Meteor.js developer and I am not looking back! I invite you to join me on my journey into the future!

To find out more about meteor I suggest the following link: 

http://yauh.de/articles/376/best-learning-resources-for-meteorjs