Great First Ember.js Tutorial

I wish I had read this before any other Ember.js tutorial.

Advice on & Instruction in the Use Of Ember.js

Ember isn't hard...

Listen: it's not Ember that's hard. It's the concepts.

Is Ember overkill?

Ember applications start out with a complexity rating of 4/10 but never get much higher than 6/10, regardless of how sophisticated your application becomes. Backbone starts out at 1/10 but complexity grows linearly. This is a natural side effect of the types of applications the two frameworks were specifically created for.

Coming from a Flex/Actionscript background, I think it was harder to wrap my head around Ember's nomenclature and structure than for most. For example, a controller in Ember is more like a view model in Flex best practices. This tutorial helped me understand that quickly. It's concise and gets right to what most of us need to get started: set up a few views with data-binding, load data from an api, and learn routes for those views.

Beginner tips for the tutorial:

Download the starter kit from emberjs.com and include the scripts in the document. Use the version of jQuery provided, not the latest greatest, to prevent hair pulling and profanities.

<script src="path-to/jquery-1.7.2.min.js"></script>
<script src="path-to/handlebars-1.0.rc.1.js"></script>
<script src="path-to/ember.v1.0.0-pre.2.js"></script>

Wrap App.initialize() in jQuery's document-ready function to prevent more hair pulling.

$(function() {
    App.initialize();
});