Book Image

Bootstrap 4 By Example

Book Image

Bootstrap 4 By Example

Overview of this book

Bootstrap is a free, open source collection of tools that helps developers create websites or web applications. It provides a faster, easier, and less repetitive solution to designing and building applications. Before Bootstrap’s release, it was necessary to import a variety of libraries into your project that offered different components and features for web interface development. Plus with the increased popularity of smartphones there were lack of libraries that could handle the responsiveness of a web page. Bootstrap‘s existence let it quickly become famous as a front-end framework that offered a wide set of tools from page grid up to components that render a web page in the best possible way for any device. This book will be a tutorial covering various examples as well as step-by-step methodology to create interesting web applications using Bootstrap and to understand the front-end framework to its core. We begin with an introduction to the Bootstrap framework and setting up an environment to build a simple web page. We then cover the grid system, basic Bootstrap components, HTML elements, and customization components for responsive and mobile first development. This is presented by creating a beautiful Landing page sample. You will also learn how to create a web application like Twitter by using the full set of components offered in the framework. Finally, you will learn to create a dashboard web app, using Bootstrap to its finest potential including component customizations, event handling, and external library integration. All these examples are explained step-by-step and in depth, while covering the versions 3 and the most recent version 4 of Bootstrap. So, you will be in the state of the art for front-end development. By the end of this book, you will be familiar with the development of a plugin for the framework and Bootstrap’s world which is popular for fast paced front-end web development, used in countless projects all over the world, and now yours.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
12
Index

Getting Bootstrap

There is some version of the framework, but in this book, we will provide support for the latest Bootstrap 3 version (which is v3.3.5), along with the newest version 4 (which is 4.0.0-alpha). When a feature or component is differently supported by one of these versions, we will point it out properly.

First of all, access the official website at http://getbootstrap.com/ and click on the Download Bootstrap button, as shown in the following screenshot:

Getting Bootstrap

Tip

Downloading the example code

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

  • Log in or register to our website using your e-mail address and password.
  • Hover the mouse pointer on the SUPPORT tab at the top.
  • Click on Code Downloads & Errata.
  • Enter the name of the book in the Search box.
  • Select the book for which you're looking to download the code files.
  • Choose from the drop-down menu where you purchased this book from.
  • Click on Code Download.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

  • WinRAR / 7-Zip for Windows
  • Zipeg / iZip / UnRarX for Mac
  • 7-Zip / PeaZip for Linux

Then you will be redirected to another page that contains these buttons:

  • Download Bootstrap: This is the release with the files already compiled.
  • Download source: Use this if you want to get the source for customization. This requires knowledge of the Less language.
  • Download Sass: Here, you can get the source code in the Sass language.

Click on the Download Bootstrap button to get the framework, since we will cover the full framework using, not Sass, but just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. After the download, extract the files and you will see that the framework is organized in folders.

Tip

Other versions and releases

Check out the official repository at https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/ to pick up other versions and see the new releases under development. You will also be able to see other features and community activity.

If you want to go hands-on straightforward with version 4, go to http://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/ and download it, or enter the GitHub repository and select the corresponding branch of version 4.

After you've extracted the files, you will see some folders. The first one, in alphabetical order, is css. Here, you will find the main CSS file (named bootstrap.css), other files related to the minified version, and a bootstrap-theme.css file, which is a simple theme of using the Bootstrap components.

There is also a fonts folder; it contains the files used for the icon components that we will see in future chapters. Finally, there is a folder named js, where we can find the bootstrap.js file, the minified version, and the specification for npm.

Tip

What is the npm file?

The npm is the most famous package manager for JavaScript. It is set as the default package manager in the Node.js environment.