A week or so ago, Sacha Greif asked me whether I would be willing to write a review of his new book on Meteor (published today) entitled Discover Meteor. Sacha wrote the book with Tom Coleman. Both Sacha and Tom are very active in the Meteor community – they are responsible for several well-known Meteor packages and projects including Atmosphere, Meteorite, meteor-router and Telescope — so I suspected that their book would be good.

If you have not heard of Meteor, Meteor is a new framework for building web applications which is built on top of Node.js. Meteor excels at building a new category of constantly-connected, real-time web applications. It has some jaw-dropping features which I described in a previous blog entry:

http://stephenwalther.com/archive/2013/03/18/an-introduction-to-meteor.aspx

So, I am super excited about Meteor. Unfortunately, because it is evolving so quickly, learning how to write Meteor applications can be challenging. The official documentation at Meteor.com is good, but it is too basic.

I’m happy to report that Discovering Meteor is a really good book:

· The book is a fun read. The writing is smooth and I read through the book from cover to cover in a single Saturday afternoon with pleasure.

· The book is well organized. It contains a walk-through of building a social media app (Microscope). Interleaved through the app building chapters, it contains tutorial chapters on Meteor features such as deployment and reactivity.

· The book covers several advanced topics which I have not seen covered anywhere else. The chapters on publications and subscriptions, routing, and animation are especially good. I came away from the book with a deeper understanding of all of these topics.

I wish that I had read Discover Meteor a couple of months ago and it would have saved me several weeks of reading Stack Overflow posts and struggling with the Meteor documentation

If you want to buy Discover Meteor, the authors gave me the following link which provides you with a 20% discount:

http://discovermeteor.com/orionids