IoT Development for ESP32 and ESP8266 with JavaScript: A Practical Guide to XS and the Moddable SDK

Been trying for three days, got 3 pages in, and get told to install software, follow website (invariable out of date by the looks), and just cannot install the software rendering the book absolutely useless!

Managed to get to page 7 and download the software however unable to setup using the instructions in the book or the links provided. No guidance available on how to resolve, making the book unusable, perhaps a PhD in IT Geekery is required to progress with this book. Not for me, have returned for refund.

I saw the Moddable Two LCD display built on an ESP32 processor two years ago at the San Francisco Maker Fair. I thought is looked like a great way for making simple IoT type devices that would have a user interface. I put one on my Christmas list and this year one showed up. What I had not realized in the chaos of the Maker Fair is that these are programmed not with C/C++ but with JavaScript. I have never programmed with JavaScript and so I started looking for examples, tutorials, and references. The Moddable website has a large number of examples, but nothing that matched my needs, so I started asking newbie question of their forum. I discovered they they were being answered by the founder and one of the co-authors of this book. During our online conversation he would reference chapters in the book where he discussed the issues I was having. So I plunged and bought the book.The book takes you on a guided tutorial of the features of the language via numerous examples that are available for download. This is not a dry reference book. It is well written and seems to have touched on the major points. It is not a detailed book on JavaScript (you can find those online) but rather how the language is used in graphic embedded system. I was not disappointed in the book at all. In fact I would recommend it for anyone that is starting out trying to learn JavaScript to bring a UI to life on a Moddable device.If you read my other reviews, you will see that I only reserve a five star review for products that go above and beyond what I would expect from the product. This book did exactly that.

I've been looking for something like this for a long. It's a huge time saver for small platform development.When trying to develop interesting applications on small platforms, I waste a huge amount of time pulling together all of the documentation for the hardware and the software, figuring which versions are compatible with other versions, and then chasing down bugs that often are just about something that is poorly documented or doesn't work with something else. I get to spend relatively little time working on my application, and because sophisticated libraries often bring with them complex bugs and compatibility issues, I avoid them.What I love about this book and the Moddable SDK is that gives you a complete software solution where, not only does the software provide a deep platform and nice environment to work in, but the book also covers the hardware and shows you how all the pieces fit together. It's great to just dive in with this book and get sophisticated stuff working.

I would not recommend this book or framework. It makes much more sense to learn how to use the c++ the esp32 is made for instead of trudging through this buggy mess. Furthermore it really slows down the esp32, and is really only suitable for the most basic of iot. Furthermore the community is so tiny that, you won’t have nearly the support or libraries available otherwise. Just use platformIO on vscode, and spend the money you would have spent on this book on a jtag debugger