The Meteor Developer's Mega Learning Resource List

I have previously made a mega resource for learning Rails, but since then I have switched focus to pure Front End / Meteor development, and so I thought it was time to create a mega resource for the Meteor community! I’ll be updating this frequently, so suggestions are welcome.

Before you read any further, I’m going to just throw this out there…simply reading the docs for all of the various languages, frameworks, and packages that you are working with will be just about as helpful as anything else. Simple, but effective. Any time you are coding, whether it’s Meteor, pure Javascript, or HTML/CSS just open up the docs and have it ready as a reference. Okay, enough from me. Happy learning!

Table of Contents

Community Chats and Forums
Podcasts
Full Courses, Moocs, and Bootcamps

Meteor Specific

Recommended Books
Intermediate / Advanced Learning
Screencasts
Meteor Tools
Boilerplates

Fundamentals

Beginner / Hand Holding
Practice
HTML / CSS
UX / Design
Unix / Bash

Misc

Tools and Utilities
Recommended Editors
Workflow Upgrades
Searching for a Job

Community Chats and Forums

Learning alone can be hard! Join in with others and get help when you really need it. This is my #1 recommendation for anyone learning to code.

  • Meteor Club Chat (Paid) - Join Josh Owens, several authors, MDG members, and more in an amazing and productive chat about all things Meteor.
  • Code Buddies - Website for organizing hangouts, study groups, and chats for various coding topics (It’s also built in Telescope, a Meteor project).
  • Free Code Camp Chat - Amazing community for Javascript learning (they mostly focus on the MEAN stack, but many also use Meteor)
  • Codenewbie - Very active and enthusiastic community with chats, blog, forum and a weekly podcast.
  • Telescope Chat - For anyone interested in the telesc.pe platform, this is a great place to get help and discuss issues.
  • Crater.io - Reddit style news forum for Meteor. Developed by Josh Owens with the Telescope platform.
  • /r/Meteor - Well, it’s the ACTUAL reddit for Meteor :)

Podcasts

  • The Crater Podcast - A weekly news show about what’s going on in the Meteor community.
  • Meteor Club Podcast - Weekly roundtable discussion about all things Meteor.
  • Meteor Interviews - Interviews with top Meteor developers and community members.
  • How to Hold a Pencil - Interviews from mostly self taught programmers about learning web development.
  • Shop Talk - Hilarious AND insightful podcast about all things front end related
  • Code Newbie - Fun and friendly podcast targeted at new programmers.
  • Javascript Jabber - Variety of more advanced topics in the realm of Javascript.

Full Courses, Moocs, and Bootcamps

  • OK Grow Workshop - 2 day Workshop for learning Meteor from one of the top Meteor Dev Shops.
  • Master Meteor - Workshop by Josh Owens covering best practices for building a Meteor app.
  • Free Code Camp - Extremely comprehensive resource for going from zero to full stack developer. Highly Recommended
    • A note about this…they focus on the MEAN stack, so as a Meteor developer just do the projects with Meteor. It’s actually easier lol.
  • Bootcampr - Great website for finding specific bootcamps.
  • Skilledup Comprehensive List of Bootcamps

Meteor Centric

Intermediate / Advanced Learning

  • Web Tempest - This website has been VERY helpful to me for learning the more advanced / useful packages of Meteor.
  • BulletProof Meteor - Learn how to make your Meteor apps run FAST and EFFICIENT.
  • MongoDB University - Learning MongoDB in and out will help you become a better Meteor developer.
  • Meteor Chef - Advanced Meteor ‘recipes’ - Newer but promising blog with some great articles.
  • Meteor Testing - Testing in Meteor is still new, and this book is not finished. Written by one of the Velocity core members.

Screencasts

  • Evented Mind - Literally THE BEST screencasts I’ve ever watched by the creator of Iron Router. Learn Meteor internals and also some Javascript!
  • Meteor Tuts - Several video walkthroughs for building full Meteor apps.

Meteor Tools

  • Meteor Toys - Insanely handy dev tools for Meteor. A MUST have!
  • Package Kitchen - Easily create packages for Meteor.
  • Kadira - Performance monitoring for Meteor.
  • Velocity - Meteor’s official testing framework.
  • Meteor Pad - Amazing tool for sharing functional Meteor code and snippets.

Boilerplates

These are great when you are still figuring out best practices for packages to use and what folder structures to use…or just getting started quickly! Just remember these are opinionated so find one that works best for you or create your own!

  • Meteor Starter - Make Meteor apps. Fast. Pure JS or Coffeescript versions. Woo!
  • Differential Boilerplate - Includes iron-router, Bootstrap 3, Font Awesome, LESS, and more.
  • Base - A very large and opinionated boilerplate from the author of The Meteor Chef blog.
  • Parlay Starter Pack - All of the 'Must Have’ packages bundled into one! (The author also has a 'full pack’ with even more).
  • Go to Packages - Reddit post Q&A about recommended packages.

Fundamentals

Meteor is PURE Javascript, so many of these resources will help hone your JS skills. You will also want to learn HTML / CSS of course.

Beginner / Hand Holding

  • Codecademy - I suggest going through the Javascript and JQuery courses here as a newbie.
  • Khan Academy - Learn Javascript, HTML, CSS in a fun and creative way.
  • Code Combat - Fun game designed to help kids learn to code.

Practice

  • Exercism - Submit challenges and get feedback or nitpick other’s work.
  • Javascript Koans - Fun and creative challenges for learning Javascript.
  • Code Wars - Complete challenges and make your own for others to complete.
  • Code Fights - Challenging and Stressful code battles. Site built with Meteor!

HTML / CSS

HTML / CSS Resources
  • Coveloping - TONS of great tools / utilities for front end development
  • HTML Color Picker - Pick out colors and return in Hex
  • Bootstrap - The most commonly used CSS Framework
  • Materialize - Modern responsive front-end framework based on Google’s Material Design
  • Ionic - Create amazing Hybrid (phone / web) apps

UX / Design

  • Hack Design - Great course for developers learning design.
  • 52 Weeks - 52 Quality articles on the topic of UX / Design.
  • Smashing Magazine - Variety of articles for front end topics.
  • A List Apart - Some of the best posts and articles I’ve found about front end design.
UX / Design Resources
  • Font Awesome - You should be using these icons in your projects. Srsly.
  • Google Web Fonts - Resource for downloading free fonts.
  • Unsplash - Free to use High-Res photos.
  • Box Around Divs - Enclose all divs on a page with a box. Great for designing, and debugging layouts!

Unix / Bash

  • Ryan’s Tutorials - Very high quality tutorials for learning Unix commands and Bash scripting.
  • True Ability - A real-world, real-server test of Linux and DevOps skills.

Miscellaneous

Tools and Utilities

  • Git and Github - Probably the single most important tool. Version Control es numero uno!
  • Codepen.io - Front end playground and code editor.
  • Webstorm - Currently THE best “IDE” for Meteor at the moment.
  • Sublime Text 3 - I used this before switching to Vim.
  • Cloud 9 - Cloud based code editor, and even supports pairing!
  • Vim - MY editor of choice, so here are some more resources for using it ;)

Workflow Upgrades

Searching for a Job

Should I add or edit anything on this page? Please let me know, as I would like to keep it current. You can send me a Tweet , Email , or create an issue on my Github page.

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