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

Understanding the grid system


The basis of the Bootstrap framework relies in its grid system. Bootstrap offers components that allow us to structure a website in a responsive grid layout.

To exemplify this, imagine an electronic square sheet table that can be divided into many rows and columns, as shown in the following screenshot. In the table, you can create as many lines as you want while merging cells. But what would happen if you wanted to change the layout of a single row? That could be painful.

The Bootstrap grid system works in a different way. By letting you define a set of rows, each one having a set of independent columns, it allows you to build a solid grid system for your web page. Also, each column can have different sizes to perfectly fit your template.

This not being enough, the Bootstrap grid system adapts for every viewport and resolution, which we call responsiveness.

To start learning about the grid system, we will introduce it using the example of a landing page. As you...