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Learning Bootstrap
Learning Bootstrap

Learning Bootstrap: Unearth the potential of Bootstrap to create responsive web pages using modern techniques

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Learning Bootstrap

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Bootstrap

The styling and presentation of your website is imperative, as it plays an important role in creating a sublime user experience. Therefore, you need to acquire design skills, which help you to create attractive websites. Add deadlines to the project where time is imperative and you realize you have quite a task at hand. Several toolkits and frameworks have come to the fore to ease and streamline the task of web designing but none comes close to the open source framework, Bootstrap.

Since 2013, Bootstrap has become one of the most popular projects on the code-sharing platform GitHub. It has good community support and a vast ecosystem including templates and extensions built around it. With a modular approach, Bootstrap saves you a considerable amount of time and effort allowing you to focus on the core parts of your web development projects. Released initially by Twitter to maintain consistency in their internal web designing and development projects, Bootstrap has evolved and since the release of Version 3 has been licensed under the open source MIT license.

Mobile-first design

With the advent of mobile phones and tablets, responsive web design is the need of the hour. Earlier, there was the graceful degradation approach wherein you build a website for desktops and then remove features and adapt it for small screen sizes with a lesser set of capabilities resulting in a watered down, subpar browsing experience.

With the release of Bootstrap 3, a mobile-first approach was implemented thereby helping you to create websites that function efficiently on mobile platforms despite the platform constraints. This included taking into account all the restrictions of mobile devices and creating a website that is powerful with cross-browser compatibility giving your website users an awesome mobile experience. Using progressive enhancement techniques, you then add other features for desktop users thereby increasing the accessibility significantly. Thus, your website is well-equipped to handle changes regardless of whether you are using an iPad device, a Windows PC, or any other platform of your choice.

Let's consider that we design a navigation bar for a web page. On a desktop screen, the web page will be displayed as follows:

Mobile-first design

It is quite evident that the website displays the navbar brand Packt Publishing alongside the menu options such as Books and Videos, Articles, Categories, and Support with the search field on the right-hand side.

However, on a small screen mobile phone, the web page would be displayed as follows:

Mobile-first design

On clicking the expandable mobile navigation icon displayed at the top right corner of the mobile screen, the following screen will be displayed:

Mobile-first design

Thus, you can see the mobile-first approach of Bootstrap demonstrated by the preceding screenshots.

Why Bootstrap

Bootstrap is "batteries-included", meaning that it brings along with it an incredible responsive Grid system and Base CSS, including extensible classes for implementing and enhancing styling for various elements ranging from typography, buttons, tables, forms, and images to mention a few. With an extensive list of components that consist of Glyphicons, responsive navigation bars, BreadCrumbs, Alerts, and much more in addition to official plugins for Modals, Carousels, and PopOvers to name a few, Bootstrap has you covered. With basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, you can understand Bootstrap and implement it in your projects thereby making it a go-to tool for web design.

Let's now look at why Bootstrap is a promising framework for web design:

  • Reusability: In web designing, a modular pattern is favored as you do not have to rewrite code for various portions of your design. Bootstrap has ready-made components, CSS styles, and plugins that can be included directly in your code. This aspect saves you a considerable amount of time and effort resulting in rapid development. Moreover, this results in easy code maintenance and helps you organize your code efficiently.
  • Consistency: Easy code readability is crucial for a designer. It also helps that the designers working with you or assigned the same project can understand the code well so as to implement modifications and alterations. As Bootstrap uses ready-made code snippets and is compatible across different browsers, there is a high degree of uniformity in your designing process. This also lowers the learning curve for new designers who want to build on the same project or implement a similar functionality on different projects.
  • Flexible grid layout: Bootstrap has a default Grid system that can scale up to 12 columns with the relative increase in the screen size and with the flexibility to opt for a fixed or fluid responsive grid. Apart from this, Bootstrap is flexible as you can add any number of customized columns that you may need on a row-by-row basis using its built-in LESS variables and mixins. Using the variables and mixins, you can determine the number of columns and the gutter width as well as the media query point, which decides the threshold for floating columns in addition to generating semantic CSS for individual grid columns. Offsetting and nesting can be implemented easily, with a few lines of code. Using Media Queries and responsive utility classes, you can also manipulate certain blocks of content by making them appear or hide based on the screen size.
  • Customization: You can customize Bootstrap significantly using the built-in Customize option, where you can choose the features that you want to use and uncheck features you don't want, making it as bloat-free as possible. You can use a Custom CSS sheet to override Bootstrap's default styles in addition to using LESS files for CSS preprocessing. Using LESS, you can use variables and mixins to alter almost every defined default attribute. Moreover, you can customize the way plugins such as Modals and Alerts work using advanced JavaScript. As SaaS compatibility and customization were introduced in the latest version of Bootstrap, you can create complex and interactive websites with Bootstrap.
  • Vibrant community with extensive third-party initiatives: Bootstrap has an active community of developers as well as immense third-party support wherein there is continuous improvisation. Bootlint, an HTML linting tool for projects using Vanilla Bootstrap, was released recently, which helps you identify incorrect Bootstrap usage errors. JavaScript frameworks such as AngularJS are used in conjunction with Bootstrap resulting in the creation of Mobile Angular UI specifically tailored for mobile-based designing. Another recent development is the installation of Bootstrap using the Node package manager. Bootstrap Bay (http://bootstrapbay.com/), Bootply (http://www.bootply.com/), and Bootsnipp (http://bootsnipp.com/) are some of the third-party websites that host a wide range of templates, editors and builders, and tailor-made snippets that help you streamline your web designing using Bootstrap.
  • Futuristic outlook and open development: The development of Bootstrap is explicitly carried out on GitHub. You can follow all the changes implemented and view the records of outstanding issues with the facility of reporting Bootstrap-related errors and bugs, in addition to contributing to the future development of Bootstrap. The project roadmap can also be found on the official website along with facets such as backward compatibility among the challenges to be addressed in the near future. Bootstrap is a framework that incorporates HTML5 and CSS3 in addition to a plethora of toolsets and utilities thereby shaping up to becoming a benchmark and a vital cog in the wheel for futuristic design and development.

Summary

In this chapter, we had a look at Bootstrap and the reasons to incorporate it in your web designing projects. You understood Bootstrap's mobile-first approach and its relevance in this era where mobiles and tablets are increasingly becoming the first medium for browsing the Web. In the next chapter, we will look at the different ways to install Bootstrap in your projects, which also includes customizing it to build impressive websites.

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Description

If you want to learn to build enterprise-level websites efficiently with Bootstrap, this book is for you. You must have a basic and fundamental understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; however, there is no need to have prior Bootstrap experience.

What you will learn

  • Empower yourself with Bootstrap's mobilefirst paradigm for create elegant responsive sites
  • Customize Bootstrap to work for your individual needs right from installation
  • Integrate LESS and get familiar with Base CSS to make your web pages beautiful
  • Get handson with Bootstrap's grid system and custom components for building robust and responsive pages
  • Discover jQuery plugins for improving the user experience of your Bootstrap site
  • Explore and implement the wealth of resources available for building with Bootstrap through the Bootstrap technical hub
  • Put theory into practice by constructing an ecommerce site using modern web development techniques

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Dec 23, 2014
Length: 204 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782161844
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Product Details

Publication date : Dec 23, 2014
Length: 204 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782161844
Languages :
Tools :

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Learning Bootstrap
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
1. Getting Started with Bootstrap Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Installing and Customizing Bootstrap Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Using the Bootstrap Grid Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Using the Base CSS Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Adding Bootstrap Components Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Doing More with Components Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Enhancing User Experience with JavaScript Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Bootstrap Technical Hub – A One-stop Shop for Powerful Bootstrap Utilities Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Index Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.4
(5 Ratings)
5 star 0%
4 star 40%
3 star 60%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
John Aponte Mar 18, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
The Learning Bootstrap book provides a very gentle but complete introduction to one of the most used frameworks nowadays to make websites. I like the style of products made with Bootstrap. I wanted to know how to use this framework and this book helped me a lot. It is full of examples that shows the most important characteristics of Bootstrap as well as how to customize it to impose your personal touch. I really enjoyed reading this book
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Vinay Mar 27, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
A book which acts as an intermediate guide to learn the technology. The content and concepts in the book are very well defined.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
--- Feb 24, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
Libro utile solo per principianti, si limita a fare u elenco di funzionalità e commentare il codice (apro il div e chiudo il div) abbastanza inutile, non passa una vera conoscenza. Leggere il libro o leggere l'elenco dei componenti sul sito ufficiale di bootstrap è la stessa cosa. Per i professional lo sconsiglio.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Rulf Neigenfind Oct 31, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
Tout le contenu de ce livre est à trouver sur le web... ...facilement et gratuitement. Rien qui dépasse le basics.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
M. Mar 26, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
The writing quality of this book is below the standards of a typical web development tutorial and it really could have used a good editor. The authors may be fluent in the English language, but that doesn't mean they know how to write clearly. I can almost hear their spoken word accents. The unnecessarily wordy and verbose presentation casts doubt on their knowledge and the quality of the material. After reading the first few chapters I'm not sure if I'm willing to work hard enough to get through the rest of it.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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