What this book covers
Chapter 1, The World Wide Web, gives you an overview of the history of what we know today as the World Wide Web.
Chapter 2, HTML, introduces HTML and gives you an overview of the most commonly used HTML tags to do web development. You will be able to create a basic website after reading this chapter.
Chapter 3, CSS, explains how to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This is used for the presentation part or layout of your website, from color to dimensions to typefaces. The most commonly used CSS properties are explained here. Once you are done with this chapter, you will be able to make your basic website look good.
Chapter 4, JavaScript, first gives you an introduction to the world of programming and programming languages. Next, the overall syntax of JavaScript and how to use it for client-side programming is introduced.
Chapter 5, PHP, explains PHP, which is another programming language. This one is used to do server-side programming. It requires a web server to do the development of your website and deploy it. You will learn how to dynamically create your web pages, rather than having to write a bunch of HTML files.
Chapter 6, PHP and MySQL, introduces MySQL, an open source database. You will learn how to create a database, manage it using the phpMyAdmin tool, and perform basic CRUD (create, replace, update, delete) operations from within a PHP program.
Chapter 7, jQuery, covers a popular JavaScript library. It allows you to write more compact and clean code and handles browser incompatibilities for you. With this, it is going to be a lot easier and faster for you to write JavaScript code that traverses and manipulates the web page. It does so by using selectors, which you learned to use with CSS. So, with jQuery, you can write JavaScript code without having to learn a lot of JavaScript.
Chapter 8, Ajax, introduces Ajax. It represents a collection of techniques to make it easy to dynamically change only portions of a website. With this chapter, we have entered the world of what I call "modern web development". The interface that we use for our Ajax calls is jQuery.
Chapter 9, The History API—Not Forgetting Where We Are, explains a very important piece of the web development puzzle. Once we are changing pages on the fly so they look different but actually remain the same page (URL), strange things can happen when visitors want to go back to what they think is the previous page. A solution for this is described here that will not only work for HTML5 but for HTML4 as well.
Chapter 10, XML and JSON, describes XML and JSON. They are two popular formats to exchange data, for example the server and the client. Although XML is used in a variety of environments, JSON is closer to the web development community.
Chapter 11, MongoDB, describes an alternative to MySQL as a database. This is a so-called NoSQL database and a document database. Documents are conveniently in the JSON format. Here, how to access a MongoDB database from within a PHP program is described.
Chapter 12, Mobile First, Responsive Design with Progressive Enhancement, has the longest chapter title of the book. It explains how modern web development has to be done now that more people are using mobile devices instead of traditional computer screens to go to websites.
Chapter 13, Foundation – A Responsive CSS/JavaScript Framework, describes most of the features of the Foundation framework, which helps you with your responsive design. It contains everything that I have always wanted to write myself but never had the time to do. This concludes the part of the book that covers what I call modern web development.
Chapter 14, Node.js, gives an overview of what I call the avant-garde of web development. It introduces node.js, which allows you to write your server-side code in JavaScript, including your own web server, which is facilitated by using the Express framework.
Appendix, Bootstrap – An Alternative to Foundation, describes the popular CSS/JavaScript framework, which is an alternative to Foundation to help you with responsive design. The main reason to include this is to point out key differences and similarities.
The online chapter, The Mono County Site, provides a full example of a website or application where we apply most, if not all, the things we learned. It is available at https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/B03816_Appendix.pdf.
