Oh, and if you switch, Dell's XPS series tends to work very well in linux, especially if you buy their developer edition, because they support ubuntu, which means you can find the drivers even if you don't use ubuntu.
I founded MeetSpace, which is video conferencing for distributed teams. I developed MeetSpace on a linux laptop (yoga 2 pro) and a linux desktop (custom w/ logitech c922 webcam).
I can tell you that for the most part it's worked flawlessly. The only issues I ever had were that linux rendering wasn't great, so sometimes the CPU was high just from rendering!
We are browser-only, so because we don't have a native app we just use browser functionality. The only thing we use the extensions for is for security to ask for permission to use the screen (it's really like a dozen lines of code).
We included a few intro chapters so that people would be able to fully comprehend our examples. Think of them as pre-requisites.
Keep in mind Rails Recipes was written by the incomparable Chad Fowler and probably had five figures worth of editing over a much longer period of time.
Our focus from the start was to provide incredibly helpful and relevant code. If we had gone through pragprog the release would have been a few months later with less rough edges.
We wrote our book from the start to be complimentary to the thoughtbot book. They are creating a great introduction through intermediate content and lots of info on rails integration.
My recommendation: buy both, read theirs, then ours :-)
I totally agree with you that we're outside the impulse-buy price range and we'd sell more copies if we charged less money.
However, our goal from the start was not to make a tutorial for people interested in backbone. Our goal was to make a more in-depth collection of great patterns for intermediate to advanced backbone developers.
Hackers are smart, they can read the docs and figure out the basics. We wanted to share our experiences with working with backbone for an extended period of time.
Our book is a great resource for people who would use backbone professionally and at $24, that's cheap.
Check out the excerpts, and read the reviews, play with backbone, learn it. When you're ready to bet your app on it, pick up the book :-)