I've been spending a lot of time working with Meteor recently. This framework uses javascript and MongoDB to create a full stack solution that is pretty easy to use. The installation is simple and painless on Ubuntu 14.04, but I'll document my process here for reference and provide some links for learning more about Meteor.

Installation

I will be following the official Meteor install instructions . It is worth noting that Meteor installs its own versions of node and MongoDB -- these will not clash with node and MongoDB if you have already them installed. This also means that you do not need to install node and MongoDB before Meteor.

The install procedure is a simple:

$ sudo curl https://install.meteor.com/ | sh

Once installed, you can check the version:

$ meteor --version
Meteor 1.2.1

Wow, it's that simple!

Getting started

The Meteor tutorial available at meteor.com is really quite good. So, this is a nice place to start. To give you a flavor, open the terminal and cd to a good location, then create a project:

$ meteor create simple-todos
Created a new Meteor app in 'simple-todos'.

To run your new app:
  cd simple-todos
  meteor

If you are new to Meteor, try some of the learning resources here:
  https://www.meteor.com/learn

This creates the project, simple-todos, and tells you what to do next:

$ cd simple-todos/
$ meteor
[[[[[ ~/Sandbox/meteor-play/simple-todos ]]]]]

=> Started proxy.
=> Started MongoDB.
=> Started your app.

=> App running at: http://localhost:3000/

If you open your browser at localhost, port 3000, the default meteor application will be running and you should be able to click a button to increment a counter -- you stop the server by doing a control-c back at the terminal.

To learn more, continue on with the Meteor tutorial , it really is quite good and covers all, or most of, the basics. Other resources that I have been using and found to be useful are (not free, but not too $$) --

• Discover Meteor book -- covers similar material to the tutorial, but in much more depth. The first few chapter are free but the complete book is about (USD) $30 at this time.
• Coursera Meteor specialization -- a series of six courses, from html/css/js basics through full Meteor apps. These courses are not free, but Coursera does offer financial aid if you need it. The first courses are basic-- but they also might go too fast if you are really an html/css/js beginner. The later courses cover lots of material and provide focus if you'd like more than books or blog posts. Strangely, the instructors don't monitor the forums and there were no teaching-assistants so the students are on their own to figure things out -- I wasn't too impressed by this aspect of the non-free courses!

So, that's the install and some places to learn more. If you have other resources to share, please leave a note -- I'd love to check it out. I also plan on writing more about Meteor in the coming weeks and months. So, check back!