What this book covers
Chapter 1, Optimizing Your Workflow, walks you through all the aspects of the Meteor development workflow. It includes best practices for repeatable, consistent project templates; for customizing your Meteor development environment; and for deploying your completed projects.
Chapter 2, Customizing with Packages, covers every aspect of the modular Meteor packaging system. Recipes that cover searching, installing, removing, modifying, creating, and deploying packages of all kinds are included. Information on how to use some of the more useful and popular packages, including npm modules and Iron Router, is also included.
Chapter 3, Building Great User Interfaces, contains essential recipes to develop front-end applications using Blaze, Meteor's reactive template engine. Everything from basic templates to custom components and animations is covered.
Chapter 4, Creating Models, provides clear, concise examples of the reactive data/model capabilities Meteor provides. From implementing a simple data collection to advanced filtering and upserts, this chapter will be your go-to reference for all of your reactive data needs.
Chapter 5, Implementing DDP, covers the major uses of the Distributed Data Protocol. Everything from reading the raw DDP stream to using the protocol with other programming languages is covered, with examples for easy implementation.
Chapter 6, Mastering Reactivity, takes you through the more advanced aspects of Meteor reactivity on the frontend. These recipes take you "under the hood" and show you how to customize and create reactive components as well as how to integrate nonreactive components (such as JQuery UI) into smooth, effective user interfaces.
Chapter 7, Using Client Methods, contains advanced UI recipes designed to take advantage of some of the more useful HTML5 components. Information and examples to create dynamic SVG graphs, implementing touch-based Canvas components, or uploading and serving images with the FileReader are all found in this chapter.
Chapter 8, Integrating Third-party Libraries, walks you through the use of standalone third-party libraries. Instructions and explanations on directly using npm modules, implementing sophisticated D3.js graphs, and building complete UIs with Polymer are included. This chapter uses these examples as guidelines, which you can extend to implement any third-party library in Meteor.
Chapter 9, Securing Your Application, goes through all of the fundamental security features of Meteor. When your application is ready to be deployed to production, the recipes in this chapter will ensure that your app is secure and performant.
Chapter 10, Working with Accounts, dives into the robust and flexible Meteor Accounts packages. You will learn how to customize the Accounts UI, use external OAuth providers such as Twitter, and even perform two-factor authentication.
Chapter 11, Leveraging Advanced Features, provides "graduate-level" methods and examples of how to take advantage of Meteor's full capabilities. Primarily focused on server-side functionality, this chapter covers extending/marshaling objects with EJSON, server methods, and the use of Fibers to elegantly handle asynchronous functions and callbacks.
Chapter 12, Creating Useful Projects, is the culmination of the other chapters in the form of a useful, complete application. The recipes walk you through creating REST services, adding social sharing to an existing app, building a complete application with Iron Router, and deploying to mobile devices.
