Backbone.js Screencast - Introduction and Views (joeybeninghove.com)

Hard as hell guitars intro and then cut to a shy mumbling nasally guy, beet face and old lady room taking up half the room on the screen.

Thanks for taking the time to do the screencast and release it, I always find screencasts are a quick way to get a feel for how a new technology is going to work.

I just went through the presentation.

> It covers Backbone Views and little bit of Events. And covers them nicely. Although, I would NOT suggest it to a pro developer (mainly due to 1 hr).

> Backbone Model, Collection, Router, Sync etc will be, hopefully, covered in the next rounds. (Somethings will need to be revisited when wiring models etc)

> A lot of time the presentations digresses.

> Didn't talk about the setup - how haml, backbone is integrated; though I agree that it shouldn't be focus when starting.

> Thanks to the video, I learnt a couple of things - views can be passed tagName..., params.name, haml each block

> Finally, I'll add that Backbone looks even more cleaner in coffeescript (errors due to missing comma? no more a problem!)

And jotted down comment after each 10 minutes into the presentation.

> 10 minutes: not really backbone (jquery, javascript gotcha mostly) - admitted at minute 11

> 20 minutes: nice smooth sailing - el, tagName

> 30 minutes: learnt a few things new things! but a bit slow for me :(

> 40 minutes: mostly jquery/inheritence, next minutes are going to be about jquery templates

> 50 minutes: focus lost in favour of templates, haml (but probably better for web-developer learning it)

Teaching and motivating is a tough thing. Keep up the good work, waiting for the next part.

Great screencast.

Before I saw it, I could hardly spell backbone.js, now I can't wait to start my first project.

Thanks for the cast, was quite informative. Kudos to you for trying to help others. Just a few suggestions for following casts. 1) Not sure if you are aware of it but there is a framework that you can use for the screencasts, just to make it look bit more professional: http://www.codeschool.com/code_tv/screencasting 2) Try give more screen space to code and browser. I personally, will rather have your code and your voice do all the talking. 3) In the beginning maybe have an outline, or list of concepts you are going to cover in the cast.

And for future casts topics request :). 1) Can you talk about testing backbone with Jasmine, maybe Sinon too? 2) Design patterns for managing your backbone code or how responsibilities should be shared among collections, models, views?

Again thanks a lot for the effort.

Thanks for sharing.

I'm completely new to backbone and jQuery and I've only recently started learning javascript (I have a C++/Java background, and only tinkered with Rails a few years back).

I agree with bilalhusain, the talk does wander a bit, but as a jQuery newbie it was quite useful for me. YMMV.

I liked how you built up the use of the framework, gradually adding events, templating, iteration etc.

I would like to be able to follow along (doing the same steps myself), but I didn't understand the starting point of your project (is it a sinatra app?). Do you have instructions on how to get setup to that point? A screencast for setup would be great, but even a list of pointers would be helpful.

Keep up the good work!

I just finished to watch ! So far the best introduction to Backbone I've see (I never used it, but seriously considering to). I'm not going to repeat the criticism posted in comment, I agree with most of them, and I look forward to new tutorials from you !