Over the recent years, the open source community has come up with great tools that have eased development, such as CSS preprocessors, simple-to-use testing libraries, and minification/compression libraries. Aimed to facilitate the automation of tasks, Grunt helps both developers and sysadmins by speeding up the development time and easing the production integration process.
This chapter will reintroduce you to Grunt and demonstrate the importance of various other software tools. As you go further into the book, you will learn how to develop your own projects using Grunt, with an increase in complexity and applicability. In particular, you will acquire knowledge of how to use Grunt efficiently as a software integration tool as well as learning about the best practices surrounding web development today.