I agree with this up to a point. Probably the best programming book I ever worked through was Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. It was great to learn a full workflow start to finish.

While I don't necessarily have to take the concept as far as Hartl did for it to work, I would suggest that the code relating to every concept/portion of the book is capable of doing something in and of itself, regardless of how small.

Actually the Hello Backbone.js tutorial is a good example of this. http://arturadib.com/hello-backbonejs/ Every page works on it's own and build on the code from the page before.

Yep, we're big believers in hands-on learning and delivering code with this book is a big part of that.

I'm not 100% on the idea of one app for all the chapters. For books we've written and workshops we've delivered in the past, this has actually been more trouble than it's worth, and we ended up adding superfluous content in order to build a cohesive app.

We're aiming to have a code base delivered with the app where examples live, but the examples might not always cohere - we'd rather each example best illustrate its content.