

CoffeeScript Cookbook - BasDirks
http://coffeescriptcookbook.com/

======
TrevorBurnham
I'm the author of the PragProg book on CoffeeScript, and I run @coffeescript
on Twitter.

I like this site. The official CoffeeScript wiki on GitHub has some good
content, but it's fairly scattered; no one has taken an intense interest in
it. It's what happens when the main source of wiki contributions is people on
an issue tracker saying "Let's add this to the wiki." A good wiki needs to
have some organizing principle behind it, and the Cookbook's how-to ethos is
clearly striking a chord with a lot of folks.

Of course, the Cookbook is only a few weeks old; its main page is a mixture of
welcome and sorry-about-the-mess, and it still lacks a strong sense of focus.
Some topics feel superfluous ("Converting Radians to Degrees") while others
are undercovered (only two short pages on jQuery?).

Also, I find it a little alarming that the first page listed on the TOC is
"Embedding JavaScript"—I feel like the page should more or less just say,
"Don't do this!" And what's with all the classical OO design patterns? (A
bunch more are listed on the "Wanted Recipes" page.) Yes, CoffeeScript adds
classes, but a lot of those design patterns are just plain unnecessary in the
land of JS. Adding Java-esque boilerplate would be a huge step backwards.

Still, I'm optimistic. As CoffeeScript gains popularity, it's likely that the
Cookbook will grow to become an important resource.

~~~
BasDirks
I bought your book last week, and can recommend it to anybody who wants to get
a solid grip on CoffeeScript.

------
jjm
Nice!

I would tho rather like to see the project use something like CoffeeKup than
textile to keep it pure of heart.

Btw, I did do a pull request when I first commented ;-)

~~~
TrevorBurnham
CoffeeKup is great for layouts, but it's very Haml-esque. I think it suffers
from many of the issues described in "Haml Sucks for Content"
([http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2010/02/08/haml-
sucks-f...](http://chriseppstein.github.com/blog/2010/02/08/haml-sucks-for-
content/)). Markdown/Textile are really better-suited to a wiki.

~~~
jjm
I agree, just wanted to see a pure JS dependent solution for a JS project.
Know what I mean?

~~~
TrevorBurnham
Well, there are JS implementations of both Markdown and Textile:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1319657/javascript-to-
con...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1319657/javascript-to-convert-
markdown-textile-to-html-and-ideally-back-to-markdown-te)

It would be cool if the site used one of these, since then you could view the
markup of a page and see how markup changes would affect that page in real-
time.

