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

Building our first Bootstrap example

Now we are all set for the framework. Replace the Hello World! line in the body tag with this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <title>Hello World!</title>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/bootstrap.css">

    <!--[if lt IE 9]>
      <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/html5shiv/3.7.2/html5shiv.min.js">
</script>
      <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/respond/1.4.2/respond.min.js">
</script>
    <![endif]-->
  </head>
  <body>

    <div class="jumbotron">
      <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
      <p>This is our first sample example that will be more awesome in the next chapters!</p>
      <a class="btn btn-primary btn-lg" href="#" role="button">
        Bootstrap by Example, Chapter 1
      </a>
    </div>


    <script src="js/jquery-1.11.3.js"></script>
    <script src="js/bootstrap.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

Open the hello_world.html file in the browser, and it must appear like what is shown in the following screenshot:

Building our first Bootstrap example

Congratulations! You have created your first Bootstrap web page. It is simple but very important to understand the details of how to set the framework correctly to keep the recommendation pattern.

Furthermore, we added some components in this example that will be explained in future chapters, but you can start becoming familiar with the CSS classes used and the placement of the elements.

The container tag

You may notice that in our example, the page content is too close to the left-hand side and without a margin/padding. This is because Bootstrap has a required element called container that we have not added in the example.

The container tag must be placed to wrap the site content and nest the grid system (we will present the grid system, called scaffolding, in the next chapter). There are two options for using the container element.

The first one is for creating a web page responsive with a fixed-width container. This one will add responsive margins depending on the device viewport:

<div class="container">
    ...
</div>

In case you want a full-width container, covering the entire width of the viewport, use container-fluid:

<div class="container-fluid">
    ...
</div>

In our example, we will create a fixed-width responsive website. So, our code will be like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <title>Hello World!</title>

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/bootstrap.css">

    <!--[if lt IE 9]>
      <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/html5shiv/3.7.2/html5shiv.min.js">
</script>
      <script src="https://oss.maxcdn.com/respond/1.4.2/respond.min.js">
</script>
    <![endif]-->
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="container">
        <div class="jumbotron">
            <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
            <p>This is our first sample example that will be more awesome in the next chapters!</p>
            <a class="btn btn-primary btn-lg" href="#" role="button">
              Bootstrap by Example, Chapter 1
            </a>
        </div>
    </div>

    <script src="js/jquery-1.11.3.js"></script>
    <script src="js/bootstrap.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

The next screenshot shows what our example looks like with the addition of the container class. I recommend for practicing and complete understanding, that you change the container class to .container-fluid and see what happens. Change your viewport by resizing your browser window and see how Bootstrap adapts your page visualization:

The container tag

The preceding image shows the differences between using .container and .container-fluid. See the differences of the margins in the sides.

Soon during this book, you will be able to create more complex and beautiful websites, using more advanced Bootstrap components such as the show case shown in the following screenshot, which is an example of a landing page.

Do not worry. We will start at a slow pace to reveal the basics of Bootstrap and how to use it properly on our web page. The following example is our first goal when we develop a landing page example. Just keep in mind that we will always use the same basis presented in this chapter.

The container tag