I am trying to learn backbone, however truth be told, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. Everywhere I look it is being done in a slightly different way, each with more frameworks and plugins to learn. So I have decided to put my faith in Addy Osmani and am reading his Backbone Fundamentals book. I have followed his recommendation and used the Backbone-Boilerplate. However for whatever reason, I have been unable to successfully install Grunt BBB so I cannot download the working examples.
What I am trying to do is follow this router section and use views. http://addyosmani.github.com/backbone-fundamentals/#router.js.
The problem is that I think these instructions are incomplete. For a start the collection.fetch() variable is in the wrong scope, and I really am not understanding where I need to place the views and how. I am pretty sure that if I could see a working example of this I could understand it, but as I said, everywhere I look its a different implementation.
Does anyone know how to use the backbone-boilerplate with routers and views? Are there any working examples anywhere?
Let me make a suggestion. A couple of months ago, I was where you are now: trying to learn backbone and trying to follow best practices while I did so. Like you, I came across Addy Osmani's book and like you I tried getting stated with backbone-boilerplate.
After much stumbling around, I eventually concluded that backbone-boilerplate was not something I needed to have while I was just learning backbone. It is now, only after having created a fully working, non-trivial CRUD application that I start to see how I might incorporate backbone-boilerplate. I think you probably need to be asking the questions that backbone-boilerplate answers (How can I break up my application into modules?, etc.) before you attempt to incorporate another framework or plugin. The same goes for Backbone.Marionette: great library, but you really need to have something to apply it to before using it.
Starting out, I would suggest having just a single file for all your backbone code.
One of the things that really helped me out was playing around with and extending various jsfiddle demos people had created using backbone. A simple google search will turn up quite a few. I found it a great way to learn as I was able to manipulate working code and get immediate feedback on what worked and what was allowed.
And although backbone is a client-side library, it's often simpler and faster just to ignore html and write stuff out to the console.
Finally, if you're willing to pay for it, I highly recommend Liam McLennan's set of backbone.js training videos on pluralsight.