Preface

I am fortunate to have lived and worked in California for a long time. The majority of that time, I lived in Palo Alto, which is the center of Silicon Valley, the home of Stanford University, and the birthplace of many companies, big and small, such as Sun Microsystems, where I worked. I sat on the front row to see how the World Wide Web developed, as well as being present for the advent of social media. Facebook started on the other side of the wall of my favorite restaurant. Now, some Facebook guy or girl is sitting in what used to be my office at the bottom of the Dumbarton Bridge. As a product manager for Solaris, one of my tasks was to make sure that Netscape Navigator was included with our operating system. So, I was right at the source in which the development of the Web began. I even went to the Web 2.0 conference and bought the book of the same name.

Then, I felt the need to have my own website to display my photographs and inform people about the beauty and interesting places of the parts of California that I had discovered during my many journeys travelling around the state. So, I created one. One day, I was telling a friend about it and he tried to look at it on his mobile phone. It looked terrible. So, I bought a Nokia phone (a brick compared to what we have today) so that I could test my own site to make sure that it looked good on a phone as well. This is how I caught the bug of responsive design, years before someone started calling it this.

Upon my return to Belgium, I decided that it was time to learn as much as possible (I love to learn new things) about what is out there beyond creating websites and took a 6-month course on PHP web development. A lot of it looked familiar as I was previously a UNIX and C developer. There were only 12 people in the class, who were all bright minds, and I quickly discovered that there was more to learn.

As the classes took place in Leuven, a major university town in Belgium, I went to the local university bookstore and bought book after book on all kinds of related topics and quickly became a jQuery fan. jQuery, by the way, was not even included in the course. I started wondering why someone needed to have 35 different books to learn about web development and that writing a single book that gave a comprehensive overview of what you need to know to engage in web development would not be a bad idea.

Since then, web development has changed a lot; more books were needed, eBooks this time, but the concept remained the same. So, now you know why I wrote the book.

This book gives you an overview of all the general aspects of web development, in a traditional way, using plain HTML to do static websites, as well as the current way, to enable you to create your web pages dynamically and make sure that they look great on mobile devices as well, by using responsive design. We conclude by giving you a hint of what is yet to come if you replace the traditional web server by writing your own using node.js.