Prosthetics And Orthotics: Building Backbone Plugins

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

It was almost a year ago that I announced a book on building Backbone.js plugins. Since then… nothing. Well I finally got tired of sitting on it and over the weekend I made a bunch of edits, cleaned up a lot and released the first 6 chapters of the book via Leanpub!

https://leanpub.com/building-backbone-plugins

Learn the how and why of building plugins for Backbone.js. This book provides first hand lessons learned, best practices, and patterns for building flexible add-ons and frameworks components, based on my experience – both success and failure – from the last few years of working with Backbone and building plugins for it!

On Buidling Backbone Plugins

I’ve built more than a handful of Backbone related tools, plugins and add-ons in my time working with it. From nearly the beginning of my exploration and use of Backbone, in fact, I’ve been looking for and developing better methods of handling common tasks and solving the same problems. This has led me to create plugins and frameworks such as MarionetteJS (Backbone.Marionette), Backbone.Picky, Backbone.ModelBinding and many more – some published on my Github account, many unpublished and created for a specific client application.

In all of the plugins and add-ons that I’ve built, there have been lessons learned. The continued success of frameworks like MarionetteJS provide many useful insights in to how to properly create view layers and additional object types that support the creation of large Backbone application. Equally as valuable, though, failures such as Backbone.Modelbinding provide insight in to the patterns and practices that should be avoided when creating add-ons. Or, at least, they illustrate some of the scenarios and circumstances in which these patterns and practices fall apart.

A Work In Progress

This book is a work in progress, with 6 chapters roughly completed at this time, 3 or 4 additional chapters in rough draft, and one or two chapters planned beyond that. Expect this book to change over time, with edits and additional chapters being added. Early adopters will be able to purchase the book at a discounted price. The amount of demand I am seeing from early adopers will largely determine the schedule that I keep for additional releases, and the eventual price that is charged for the finished product.

https://leanpub.com/building-backbone-plugins

Be sure to follow the book on twitter for updates, as well: @BackbonePlugins