// the find
addyosmani/backbone-fundamentals
:book: A creative-commons book on Backbone.js for beginners and advanced users alike
A free, open-source book teaching Backbone.js application architecture — models, views, routers, modular development with RequireJS, and testing with Jasmine/QUnit/Sinon. Written for developers learning MV* patterns in the pre-React era of JavaScript, or picking apart what came before today's frameworks.
The practicals are full working apps (a library catalog, a photo browser, a todo app with Jasmine koans) rather than isolated snippets, so you see how models/views/routers actually wire together. Coverage of unit testing with Jasmine and Sinon.js stubs/mocks is still a decent read on testing patterns independent of Backbone itself. The book builds to multiple output formats (epub, mobi, PDF) via a real Pandoc/Makefile pipeline, which is more effort than most free tutorials bother with.
Backbone.js has been effectively dead for years, and the vendored dependencies show it: jQuery 1.9, Underscore 1.2.2, RequireJS 1.0.2 — none of this reflects how anyone builds JS apps in 2026. The 'Last push 2024-11-30' is misleading; skimming the structure, that's almost certainly a doc/link fix, not content revision, so treat the technical content as frozen circa 2013. No mention of ES modules, npm, or any modern build tooling, so the modular-development chapter teaches AMD patterns nobody uses anymore. Content is CC-BY-NC-ND, meaning you can't legally fork and modernize it even if you wanted to.