Ember Library #2: The Reference Section
One aspect of Ember that gets talked about the most is its learning curve. Historically, it’s not been an easy framework to pick up, but that story is ever-improving. With the advent of tools like Ember-CLI and the simplification of the framework’s patterns, there’s never been a better time to learn Ember. If you’ve been in the community for a while, you already know how much better the ecosystem is getting. With the continual evolution of the framework, though, even the hardened Ember warriors have new things to learn. Fortunately, many community members have taken up the mantle of providing great resources to help you learn things the Ember way.
Lernin’ Ya Some Ember
Perhaps the most well-known resource apart from the Ember website itself is Ember Watch, a compilation of meetup/conference talks, screencasts, podcasts, tutorials, and even books. The most notable feature, however, is the Ember Cookbook, which strives to be a one-stop shop for answering the most common questions and issues an Ember developer might have. This community-driven cookbook is constantly improving and looks to be a strong resources for the foreseeable future.
Another popular resource is Ember Screencasts, run by Jeffrey Biles. This site provides both free and paid video tutorials that are sure to up your Ember game. These concise twice-weekly videos give you a quick boost of knowledge right when you need it most. The site even has several video series covering topics from Form Validations to Data Tables and even the Ember Inspector.
Though there is plenty of curated Ember content to go around, don’t count out the always helpful Ember Guides. These guides are written by both the core team and the community around them, and they’re even versioned to give you insight whether or not you’re on the latest Ember release. Though they’ve perhaps gained a reputation for being outdated in the past, there is now a dedicated documentation team and future features will require documentation to be ready before they can ship with the next release.
A relative newcomer to the community is the incredibly useful tool Ember Twiddle. This site gives you a JSbin-/JSfiddle-like interface combined with the structure of an Ember-CLI project. Not only can you create separate files for a working Ember sandbox, but it will even generate components, controllers, and other files types using the Ember-CLI blueprints. But wait, there’s more! Twiddles get saved as GitHub Gists, meaning you can easily retrieve them at any point as well as share them with others. Not only is this tool useful for reproducing Ember issues, it’s also a perfect way to write tutorial examples! This project is still a work-in-progress, and there are many more features to add, but it’s definitely something you will want to start using now.
Last but not least, I’d like to give a shoutout to a few great curated lists of Ember resources. Ember Links, brought to us by Chris Masters, is an extensive set of links to tutorials on a myriad of Ember topics. The always helpful Robert Jackson has a myriad of Ember Examples in an amazing Gist as well. I really can’t do these collections justice, so go check them out for yourself!
Helping Hands
More important than any tutorial, podcast, or blog post are the resources you turn to when nothing is working the way it should. The people and places where you can get surefire assistance to unblock your development and keep things shiny. The Ember community has a plethora of options, all of which you should take advantage of.
First and foremost, the Ember API Docs should be your go-to source to answer any question about how the framework functions. Heck, make them your default tab, you should be visiting that often. I’ve been to the Ember.Array page so often that if I type “arr” into the omnibox, it comes up as the first result every time! This resource has proved invaluable time and again for digging into both the public api and internals of Ember to solve a difficult problem.
The official Ember Discussion Forum is your next stop on this tour. Powered by Discourse, an Ember app itself, these boards are a go-to spot for asking questions to the community. If you can’t get an answer there, your next best bet is StackOverflow, which has over 16,000 questions tagged with `ember.js`.
Of course, what better way to get a problem resolved than by chatting directly with the core team and community members themselves? The Ember Slack has nearly 3,000 registered users, hundreds of which are online at any given time. You can drop by #needhelp any time to get assistance; say hi to me while you’re there! :) Don’t forget the old standby IRC, either. Ember has its own channel on Freenode IRC, #emberjs. You’re sure to find some friendly faces and helping hands at the ready when you stop by!
If you or your team is new to Ember or wants to step it up to the next level, there are great training options available. Check out Prototypal, an Ember training and consultancy shop run by 3 Core Team members: Erik Bryn, Trek Glowacki, and Alex Matchneer. They give training sessions from SF to NYC as well as online, and they’ve worked with a multitude of companies to get their teams living and breathing the Ember Way.
At the end of the day, everything you need to be a successful Ember developer is right here at your fingertips. From addons to weekly news, blog posts to tutorial screencasts, the web is full of amazing information to make you more productive and solve your every issue. If all else fails, don’t forget: you can always Log an Issue.
Ember Library is a blog series covering the best in Ember Resources. Check out the previous edition here.