Aurelia in Action

Four and a half stars on my scale. This is a solid and detailed introduction to how to create single-page apps (SPAs), including hybrid web/mobile apps, using the Aurelia framework.Today's web developers have many different JavaScript frameworks to choose from, but Aurelia emphasizes "component-based development," the author notes, and allows developers "to build SPAs with less framework-specific code than was possible in the past."Sean Hunter's book is well written and contains numerous illustrations and code listings. Hunter uses a project-based approach in his text. Thus, many of Aurelia's features and approaches are brought into play as you are learning how to build and enhance a data-centric SPA known as my-books, a virtual bookshelf that allows you to list and share books that you've read. Aurelia offers three different ways to start a new application, Hunter says, and he explains each. But he focuses on using the Aurelia CLI to get my-books started. (A few of the book's installation and setup screenshots and step lists do not exactly match some recent Aurelia updates and step changes, but the differences are easily navigated.)"Aurelia in Action" is recommended for intermediate developers who have had some JavaScript and MVC web-development experience.The book takes the reader from learning how Aurelia works and installing it, all the way through creating an app, enhancing it, extending it, adding animations, testing the app and deploying my-books to Firebase.Hunter notes that open source Aurelia is "one of two SPA frameworks that has commercial support available. Where frameworks such as Angular or React are developed and maintained by Google and Facebook respectively, it's not possible to pay somebody from these companies to assist you if you get into trouble or want a little extra guidance on a project."(My thanks to Manning Books for sending an advance reading copy for review.)

I'm currently working through the book and feel like it enables me to find my way around Aurelia. However, the book is seriously flawed in that:* there are many inconsistencies between the text and the examples. Sometimes I get the impression the examples were changed while writing the book but the describing text was left describing the example before the change;* the schematics are mostly useless. They consist of boxes with words and arrows that don't help me get a better understanding of the described concepts;* the presented code is partially flawed and definitely not well tested (e.g. it does not produce the same result as printed in the book, it does not work correctly under Firefox, ...)It is not that bad that I will buy another book to learn Aurelia, but I would suggest to have a look at the other books before considering this one.