While I appreciate your attempt to provide a community service, to be fair to the author, he is giving away intellectual property in order to gain an audience for his future course. Surely giving out an email is a small price to pay for the exchange if you are genuinely interested in Vue.js?
EDIT: I see the author himself chimed in on this thread with a direct download link. Kudos to him/her for doing so.
Thank you for jumping in. I was thinking about how to "react" to this :)
HN is probably not the target audience for my email list, which is more beginner-oriented, and a low percentage of HN users will leave their email there.
It's best to make the material available free of any kind of wall and let people jump in the mailing list if they enjoy it and want more.
I think it's fair to "trade" an email for a good learning resource. I mean, I'm not ok with the "3 pages ebook marketing BS leadmagnet " but it's not the case here.
A way a lot of people deal with this is to have a compulsory email box but do very minimal validation. For beginner focused content, people who know they can put a fake email and don't want to be on your mailing list are not much of a loss. And if the content is good, they might still recommend to others who will join the mailing list.
Most software I've used has easy ways to remove failed addresses. The issue is people using "fake" addresses that belong to someone else. Must be a nightmare to use johntest@gmail.com or similar.
The email "wall" is there because I want to keep in touch with my audience and possibly get back with more learning resources.
But if anyone is interested in a direct link and skip that, here it is :)
EDIT: I see the author himself chimed in on this thread with a direct download link. Kudos to him/her for doing so.