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Ya. Like a lot of hacker news posts they are really just advertisements. I bought Dave's book a couple of months ago. It's overpriced in my mind (it's more lik

Ya. Like a lot of hacker news posts they are really just advertisements. I bought Dave's book a couple of months ago. It's overpriced in my mind (it's more like half a book and stops short of delivering what I think most people would expect or want, i feel) but he is a good writer and what is in the book is pretty informative and solidly instructional.

jen729w 8y ago
Same here, but I considered part of the purchase price to be a thanks for the many useful blog posts and, as a result, am very happy with my purchase. Thanks, Dave!
- dceddia 8y ago
  Cheers, thank you too! Pricing is hard :/ Price too low, and people don't take it seriously. (e.g. $9 for 35 hours of video). Price too high and people run away. It was my first product, too. I looked at it as, "how many hours would this save someone?" Filtering through bad tutorials, just-in-time googling, all that stuff. Of course with front end there are a billion other learning resources out there, lots free, lots cheap. Hopefully the book is a more direct path than some of those others. Always room for improvement and experimentation of course :)
dceddia 8y ago
Thanks for the honest comments. What would you like to see in addition to what it covers so far? While I intentionally kept it focused on "pure React" because I felt that a big part of the "React is hard" sentiment seems to come from how much other stuff gets lumped in with it (and then people feel compelled to learn it all at once), I've been considering expanding it to include some other tangential stuff e.g. API calls, basics of testing... any other ideas would be great to hear!
- stevehawk 8y ago
  The big hang up I remember having was the desire for a bit more into stubbing out when and where AJAX belongs. I felt like I still had a gap between the dummy application's data handling and how I'd be hitting my server side APIs when I needed them. I'm a mostly backend programmer and i remember when i was done with the book thinking "ok i can shoe horn my ajax calls into this but I don't feel confident this is how I'm supposed to." ultimately I got set straight on IRC and discord. I do enjoy your writing style and your blog posts though, and honestly did find your book helpful.

jen729w 8y ago

Same here, but I considered part of the purchase price to be a thanks for the many useful blog posts and, as a result, am very happy with my purchase. Thanks, Dave!

dceddia 8y ago
Cheers, thank you too! Pricing is hard :/ Price too low, and people don't take it seriously. (e.g. $9 for 35 hours of video). Price too high and people run away. It was my first product, too. I looked at it as, "how many hours would this save someone?" Filtering through bad tutorials, just-in-time googling, all that stuff. Of course with front end there are a billion other learning resources out there, lots free, lots cheap. Hopefully the book is a more direct path than some of those others. Always room for improvement and experimentation of course :)

dceddia 8y ago

Thanks for the honest comments. What would you like to see in addition to what it covers so far? While I intentionally kept it focused on "pure React" because I felt that a big part of the "React is hard" sentiment seems to come from how much other stuff gets lumped in with it (and then people feel compelled to learn it all at once), I've been considering expanding it to include some other tangential stuff e.g. API calls, basics of testing... any other ideas would be great to hear!

stevehawk 8y ago
The big hang up I remember having was the desire for a bit more into stubbing out when and where AJAX belongs. I felt like I still had a gap between the dummy application's data handling and how I'd be hitting my server side APIs when I needed them. I'm a mostly backend programmer and i remember when i was done with the book thinking "ok i can shoe horn my ajax calls into this but I don't feel confident this is how I'm supposed to." ultimately I got set straight on IRC and discord. I do enjoy your writing style and your blog posts though, and honestly did find your book helpful.