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

Optionally using the CDN setup

Bootstrap also offers a setup using CDN to load the framework. It's much easier to set up but comes with some regards. Instead of the <link> that we created to load the CSS, we must load it from CDN using this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.5/css/bootstrap.min.css">

And to load the JavaScript file, replace the JavaScript <script> tag with the following line:

<script src="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.5/js/bootstrap.min.js"></script>

There is some discussion on whether or not to use CDN. We will not touch upon this point, but the main pro is having the content provided faster with high availability. The main con is that you cannot have direct control over what is in the content provided, having unreliable imported code.

The decision of whether or not to use CDN depends on the case. You should consider the different arguments and choose an option that best fits your web page. There is no right or wrong, just different points of view.