We’re excited to announce the newest Code School Ember.js course, Try Ember — a new replacement for our original Warming Up With Ember.js course. It’s been just over two years since Warming Up With Ember.js released, and a lot has changed since then, so it was time for a much needed update. Today, in celebration of the course launch, I wanted to give you an overview of Ember and why you should include it in your dev skill set.

Today, Ember is well into its 2.x series of releases. These have followed more than a year of constant, but gradual changes and improvements to the framework have spanned over 20 releases and 6,000 commits. The phrase “stability without stagnation” is a mantra of the framework and describes how Ember is constantly evolving while keeping backward compatibility and developer happiness firmly in mind. The 2.0 “major” Ember release, for example, was a non-traditional major release that focused on removing deprecated features rather than introducing new, breaking changes.

The ecosystem around Ember application development has greatly matured as well. Since Warming Up With Ember.js’ release, the Ember Starter Kit has been replaced by Ember CLI — a convention-based build environment that encompasses a wide variety of components. It includes a complete testing framework, a live-reloading development server, ES2015+ support through Babel, code generators (or “blueprints”), and Ember Addons, which allow you to share and use others’ code. Similar in concept to RubyGems, Ember Addons easily extend Ember CLI applications with new libraries and functionality, including sortable elements, notification systems, charts, WebSocket support, automated application deployment, and much more.

Another great part of Ember is the community, which continues to expand and evolve today. To support that, the Ember core team has adopted the Request for Comments(RFC) process for airing and discussing ideas and directions that may significantly impact existing or future applications. They publish regular team meeting notes and maintain a community Slack account and discussion forum. They’ve even updated all of the Stack Overflow Ember questions with current, accurate information during the 2.x release process — that’s pretty incredible.

Consultants, startups, Fortune 500 companies, and government organizations are all recognizing and adopting Ember as their framework of choice, citing Ember’s longevity, community, support, and constant improvement. Just a few of the organizations adopting Ember include GoDaddy, Nordstrom, Sony PlayStation, Dollar Shave Club, Apple Music, Square, Heroku, Nest, Twitch, NBC News, and even NASA. Not a bad list of companies to keep, right?

Ember has come a long way since Code School released Warming Up With Ember.js, so if you haven’t given it a look, or it’s been a while since you have, now is your chance to get started (and did I mention you’ll earn a brand new badge?). You’ll learn the most up-to-date concepts of this fast-moving framework and its command-line interface to build your next application, so go try learning Ember — you can even play the first level for free!