I'm not sure they have the right price point. Many people will impulse buy something of interest for under $10 - psychologically, that's a small amount of money. I bought Louis C.K.'s comedy show for $5, as it's an amount of money I don't mind wasting - it's a small risk.
However at $24, you'll get a number of keen backbone fans - but you won't get all the folks who are interested in backbone, and spine, and ember, and a pile of other frameworks; it's no longer a small enough price for an impulse purchase, so they'll stick to free tutorials.
The same thing applies to lots of other online purchases - I'll buy a vaguely-interesting phone app for $7, but probably not for $15.
The price point where people switch from "cheap as my daily coffee bill" to "the cost of a decent meal" will obviously vary from person to person, and from country to country. But I suspect that $24 is over that point for a lot of people.
(me, I'll probably buy it - but I'll think about it for a lot longer than I would at $5)
I totally agree with you that we're outside the impulse-buy price range and we'd sell more copies if we charged less money.
However, our goal from the start was not to make a tutorial for people interested in backbone. Our goal was to make a more in-depth collection of great patterns for intermediate to advanced backbone developers.
Hackers are smart, they can read the docs and figure out the basics. We wanted to share our experiences with working with backbone for an extended period of time.
Our book is a great resource for people who would use backbone professionally and at $24, that's cheap.
Check out the excerpts, and read the reviews, play with backbone, learn it. When you're ready to bet your app on it, pick up the book :-)
I looked at the excerpt. The typesetting is terrible for a book priced at $24. See the side by shot of rails recipes and your book. Also in your book the code is not syntax highlighted making it quite difficult to read.
The code is also formatted such a way that the codeblock splits into two pages for just a closing brace (page 44 - collection view)
For $24 I expect better typesetting. Right now it looks like a pirated OCR book.
The content may be great (I haven't read it) but to me a book is difficult to read if it is typeset like this.
I agree that the PDF formatting leaves something to be desired. We are using the OSS git-scribe (https://github.com/schacon/git-scribe) toolchain for producing PDF, Mobi, and ePub. I have already put a ton of work into the toolchain to make it better (http://japhr.blogspot.com/search/label/git-scribe). Most of that work, however, was to help get the Mobi and ePub versions up to snuff.
I plan to take a week or so in the very near future to again focus on improving the toolchain. Hopefully some, if not all, of your valid criticisms will get addressed.
As an open source user, I appreciate that you have improved the tools. But as a potential reader of your book, I want you to use whatever tools necessary to get it to look good.
Even when compared against a non-professionally converted pro Git PDF, this books does not fare that well. https://img.skitch.com/20111216-enxfwjcgkgsu2pcndkcaimd3q.jp... The code block has no padding. In general the typography is not pleasant. If you look at the git book, the italics do not stand out as much as in this book.
Backbone documentation is presented beautifully. So when you are aiming to compliment it, the bar is also a bit high :) (Granted it is HTML but I do think a lot can be done to make this book more pleasant to look at)
I'm sorry, but it's not a great price for a poor university student. I have played with backbone and spine some, but putting hacker cleverness aside, books are a great way to cut down the traversal of learning space. It saves time to read distilled knowledge from those who blazed the trail.
That said, best of luck with the book. I respect that you have specific plan in mind.
Edit: Seriously!? Why am I being downvoted over my financial status? Please point out what I did wrong.
I'm currently writing an eBook teaching Backbone.js in CoffeeScript, of about the same length as Recipes with Backbone. I'm still mulling over how to price it. Does anyone want to make a guess about the potential size of the market? Am I correct to think, the bigger the market, the more cheaply I can price it and still make a bit more than minimum wage for the time I'm putting in? Any further comments or suggestions about pricing are welcome.
I'm a bit scared and skeptical. The page looks extremely amateurish (Even in the source code, div class="one", div class="two", class="three", wtf?!)
Also, nothing about Jashkenas. Did the authors thought about asking Jash what he thought about it?
From the chapter excerpt, it shows how to include view into views.. which is already clearly explained in the todo example from the main backbone page. I mean, I've used backbone a few time, but don't consider myself an advanced or expert with backbone.js, and I've learned nothing from these excerpt chapters.
It seems more like an amateurish marketing splash page looking to test interested readers.
But then.. maybe the authors are really backbone.js experts and just not designers, and didn't one to spend money or ask a friend to design it for them (but why doing that if you're trying to sell something?!). And maybe I've just read an excerpt that I knew all about. And maybe Jash said something in the intro of the book?
I'm one of the authors of another Backbone ebook (more Rails integration focus), and I heartily recommend Nick & Chris's book. Great content, well-written, and applicable.
One of my personal principles is that I value educational content and training very highly. It's a worthwhile investment - worth the money at over twice the price.
These guys have been thinking hard about these problems for some time. You can see a lot of what Chris has been thinking/writing about re Backbone and JS practices on his blog http://japhr.blogspot.com/
We wrote our book from the start to be complimentary to the thoughtbot book. They are creating a great introduction through intermediate content and lots of info on rails integration.
My recommendation: buy both, read theirs, then ours :-)
Offer a money-back guarantee. If you don't feel you got your money's worth within 30/60 days, we'll give you your money back. I know that this encourages me to buy, and I can't recall ever using it. $24 is enough money that I think twice about it, but not enough that I'm concerned about being "scammed."
$2 dollars more expensive, 200+ pages and 50+ recipes lighter than my last Pragmatic Programmer ebook purchase of this type; Rails Recipes.
Also, a few of those recipes I wouldn't consider "after the tutorial" material judging off chapter title alone. Like namespacing and view templates which are covered and covered again across material from the likes of the PeepCode or BackboneScreencast tutorials. But again, that's just judging from chapter titles I haven't read it.
That said, it does seem very valuable but I think the price point is off compared to other books of that type, and other Backbone learning material.
We included a few intro chapters so that people would be able to fully comprehend our examples. Think of them as pre-requisites.
Keep in mind Rails Recipes was written by the incomparable Chad Fowler and probably had five figures worth of editing over a much longer period of time.
Our focus from the start was to provide incredibly helpful and relevant code. If we had gone through pragprog the release would have been a few months later with less rough edges.
Rails already have much more documentation published than backbone, so it make sens that for the same amount of recipes/quality the price is higher for backbone.
I'm a couple of chapters in and I'm already really glad I bought it. After watching quite a few different Backbone.js screencasts I've been after something on "paper" to really piece it all together.
After building a few toy Backbone.js apps and recently a "medium-sized" app I bought the book and was pleasantly surprised. There's similarities to the approach peepcode and other screencasts take in that there's a lot of material that is covered fairly quickly.
This is not a book for beginners, but if you've already got some backbone chops it's worth investigating as there are a number of chapters that have great insight into things you only learn after building a few apps with backbone.
Since we are discussing it here, is there anything in the book or elsewhere that discusses how you handle drag and drop events with Backbone? Specifically ones using jQuery UI? I was playing with it the other day and unable to find this.
I bought it a couple of months ago while it was half price during the beta. It is not a tutorial. I think it's really nice after you've built at least one small-medium app with backbone. It's at that point where you'll have hit some of the pain points those recipes are meant to solve.
I've been following your co-author's blog for a while now and it's great stuff. I'm sure the book is better. But yes, the price will keep me away for now...at least until I read the sample chapters ;).
If you have _any_ problems, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@recipeswithbackbone.com. We will work our collective butts off to make sure that everything gets processed correctly.
There seems to have been a delay in Google Checkout itself earlier this evening. Some purchases took upwards of 60 seconds to go through.
Everything looks OK now, though. The most recent purchases were processed in less than 7 seconds.
Sorry for the hassle. No worries, though. We will make it right by our readers!
If you're writing BackboneJS apps, you need to buy this book. There's so much great information in there. It's the book I wanted to write, but they beat me too it. :)
you should put one chapter (or even 1/2 of 1 chapter) online - i buy these things in an instant when I can get a taste of what I'm getting ala what Amazon does.
It isn't the color that is the problem. It's the relationship of the lime green to the other colors on the page that makes it jarring. The Django site uses a harmonious color scheme with the lime green as a highlight.
> Here is our _planned_ table of contents. Since this book has _not yet been released_ the order and topics may _changed_ in the future.
Not being nitpicky here. If I hadn't read the HN thread I wouldn't have understood what the state of the book that I'm being asked to pay $24 is.
One of the chapters that should be made available is the introduction so that we can get a grasp of your philosophy of instruction and what gap you hope this book fills. I know there aren't really any backbone.js books, but hopefully there's a more specific mission statement than "There isn't yet a book about backbone" yet
Dang. Fixed the TOC. Thanks for pointing that out. Nick and I will discuss making the intro available.
We are targeting intermediate / advanced Backbone.js developers. That is, you should read this after you've read the tutorials and after your first Backbone app.
The recipes are real life lessons learned from a highly traffic'd Backbone site. These recipes comprise what we have learned as we made the leap to the next level of Backbone coding. We hope they will help others do the same.
Am I the only one to think that is nothing but free advertising?
Come on, a link to 'click here to buy' page? I don't understand how this got to the first page. This is not so honest because the title is totally misleading. The link does not point to recipes with backbone.js. A more honest title would be "buy recipes to backbone.js", which is what the link actually point to.
Might be a great book, but this kind of marketing totally puts me off, I will not buy a product that is advertised with such techniques.
However at $24, you'll get a number of keen backbone fans - but you won't get all the folks who are interested in backbone, and spine, and ember, and a pile of other frameworks; it's no longer a small enough price for an impulse purchase, so they'll stick to free tutorials.
The same thing applies to lots of other online purchases - I'll buy a vaguely-interesting phone app for $7, but probably not for $15.
The price point where people switch from "cheap as my daily coffee bill" to "the cost of a decent meal" will obviously vary from person to person, and from country to country. But I suspect that $24 is over that point for a lot of people.
(me, I'll probably buy it - but I'll think about it for a lot longer than I would at $5)