Chapter 1. Getting Started with Meteor

Meteor is a framework that is essentially fast for the purpose of development even if you program at a slow pace. The aim of this book is to increase your development speed and improve quality. There are two key ingredients required to improve development: compilers and patterns. Compilers add functionality to your coding language, while patterns increase the speed at which you solve common programming issues.

This book will mostly cover patterns, but we'll use this chapter to quick start compilers and understand how they relate to Meteor—a vast but simple topic. The compilers that we will look at are as follows:

• CoffeeScript
• Jade
• Stylus

We will review some basic knowledge you should have about Meteor. This will cover the following:

• Templates, helpers, and events
• The event loop and the merge box
• The must-have packages
• Folder structure

CoffeeScript for Meteor

CoffeeScript is a compiler for JavaScript that adds "syntactic sugar"...