“Backbone Blueprints” book review

I love the magic of Angular and simplicity, but ultimately for complex SPA, I always return to my favorite framework: Backbone. Its object model (kind of classes), models and collections to easily connect to REST API, make it necessary (it’s my belief). But despite its apparent simplicity, Backbone is not always easy to control when you want to make a complete application.

The whole point of the book Backbone Blueprints by Andrew Burgess (at PacktPub) is precisely in its examples.

You’ll start by making a small blog with Backbone Express, and you will learn the basics for reading and writing data with a REST API.

The second example (an application for sharing photos) teach you how to handle authentication with Backbone.

The third example (a live data dashboard) shows you how to organize your project when it becomes larger. And you will also learn to make a full CRUD application.

Then you’ll be ready to build

• a calendar with event management,
• a chat application with Socket.io and Marionette
• a podcast application (again with Marionnette) with a nice navigation
• and finally a words game

To conclude: when you arrive at the end of this book, you will probably be able to do almost anything with Backbone. I love this kind of teaching by example. And especially when the examples are complete.