Book Image

Mastering Grunt

By : Daniel Li
Book Image

Mastering Grunt

By: Daniel Li

Overview of this book

<p>Grunt.js continues to excel as the build automation tool of choice. Along with its support for many third-party technologies, Grunt is packaged with a clean API for defining tasks. This powerful tool can streamline your workflow by automating the preparation tasks for production, such as compression, compilation, obfuscation, testing, and even pushing your web application live. This book will teach you how to master build automation and testing with Grunt. You will have the opportunity to utilize the latest and in-demand web tools, such as Git, Jade, CoffeeScript, Sass, and the Mocha testing engine, across several exciting projects by combining Grunt with them. You will also learn to create a project – a simple Bulletin Board System (BBS), which will explain the use of Grunt alongside the Mocha testing library to automate testing throughout the build process.</p> <p>Mastering Grunt will demonstrate how to leverage Grunt with other technologies to become an expert in build automation, teaching you the best practices for modern web development along the way.</p>
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Concatenation and minification


People will often ask what is so important about using tools such as Jade and Sass. To answer this, consider high-traffic websites such as blogs or e-commerce websites. With millions of hits a day, these websites must minimize the amount of HTTP requests required to load the page. This can be done through concatenating CSS and JavaScript files. Additionally, there exists a need to minimize the size of downloaded files to optimize the page load speed even further. Minification aids in this respect.

With web developers moving faster than ever, new changes are made to JavaScript and CSS repositories every day. Thus, the use of Grunt helps to optimize development efficiency by automating away large portions of the DevOps integration process.