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In this package, you will find:

The authors biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 Getting Started with Bootstrap
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Learning Bootstrap

About the Authors

Aravind Shenoy is an in-house author at Packt Publishing. An engineering graduate
from the Manipal Institute of Technology, his core interests lie in technical writing, web
designing, and software testing. He was born, and is based, in Mumbai, India. A music
buff, he loves listening to Oasis, R.E.M, The Doors, Dire Straits, and U2. Rock n' Roll
and Rap rule his playlists. He is also the author of several other books such as Thinking in
HTML and Hadoop Explained, both by Packt Publishing. You can find out more about
him on the Amazon Author Central page at
http://www.amazon.com/AravindShenoy/e/B00ITSR2WE.
He can be contacted at aravind.shenoy@hotmail.com.
I would like to thank my uncle, Dr. Ramanath N. Kamath, for motivating me
on this journey of writing the Bootstrap book. Also, a big thanks and deep
gratitude to Edward Gordon and Julian Ursell from Packt Publishing, who
helped me gain focus and precision in my writing abilities.

Ulrich Sossou is an experienced software engineer and entrepreneur with a passion for
solving problems. He enjoys helping individuals and businesses frame difficult issues in
ways that foster the emergence of the best outcomes for them and/or their businesses.
His first experience with technology came at age 8 in his uncle's computer repair shop,
where he played with early versions of personal computers, such as the Macintosh
Classic. Since then, he has gained valuable experience in software engineering,
architecture, and design as well as marketing and sales, and he has developed the
overall skill set required to run a software business.
When he's not working on open source projects or coaching less experienced software
engineers or entrepreneurs, he's the CTO of Retreat Guru
(http://retreatguru.com/), a Canadian company operating in the wellness
tourism industry; the cofounder of Flyerco (https://www.flyerco.com/), an
American company helping realtors market their properties with flyers; and the
cofounder of TekXL (http://www.tekxl.com/), a west-African
start-up incubator.

Learning Bootstrap
Bootstrap is a powerful framework to empower and enhance frontend web designing.
Version 3 comes with a plethora of features including a mobile-first responsive grid,
LESS variables, tailor-made components, and plugins that help users design dynamic
user interfaces. With the advent of mobile web development, owing to the fact that
mobiles and tablets are increasingly becoming the de facto standard for using the
Internet, it is essential that websites are developed from a mobile-first perspective and
then adapted to larger screens for desktops and notebooks. Bootstrap is batteries-loaded
meaning that it packs it all with expertly crafted solutions and attributes that help
developers to accomplish difficult tasks with ease and greater speed. Apart from its
built-in features, it gets vibrant support from the community mainly in terms of additional
resources and third-party utilities that take out a great deal of guesswork when it comes
to difficult layout styles resulting in enterprise-grade and aesthetic web applications.
Learning Bootstrap is a comprehensive source to help you get to grips with the technical
know-how enabling you to know the ins and outs of Bootstrap in an easy-tofollow format.

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Bootstrap, is a short introduction to the technology.
This chapter explains the need for Bootstrap in addition to explaining the paradigm
related to the mobile-first approach adopted by Bootstrap to streamline web designing.
Chapter 2, Installing and Customizing Bootstrap, discusses the inclusion of Bootstrap
with relevant information, overriding with customized styles, the deep customization
of Bootstrap, and compiling LESS files in a practical manner.
Chapter 3, Using the Bootstrap Grid, starts with usage of the Bootstrap Grid classes
wherein you learn about adding rows and columns and offsets, nesting of columns,
and using the different variables and mixins and summing it up with a real-time
example of creating a custom blog layout.
Chapter 4, Using the Base CSS, builds up from explaining the typography and
subsequently moves on to explain the various facets of CSS including tables, forms,
buttons, and the various responsive utilities in a step-by-step approach also including
the helper classes used extensively in Bootstrap.
Chapter 5, Adding Bootstrap Components, incorporates the learning of the popular
components such as the Glyphicons and Breadcrumbs in addition to the different
navigation components such as nav tabs, nav pills, and dropdowns, which help you
to build interactive webpages.

Chapter 6, Doing More with Components, contains an extensive in-depth understanding

of the remaining components such as wells, labels, progress bars, badges, panels, alerts,
and pagination, which form a crux of modern websites enabling you to build
aesthetic websites.
Chapter 7, Enhancing User Experience with JavaScript, deals with official and optional
plugins to create modals, carousels, tooltips, and accordion, which empowers you to
develop dynamic webpages in a jiffy thereby eliminating the need to write exhaustive
and humongous code for those attributes.
Chapter 8, Bootstrap Technical Hub A One-stop Shop for Powerful Bootstrap Utilities,
helps you to leverage the benefits of third-party toolkits and themes tailored to streamline
your web designing experience with Bootstrap. This section is a one-stop solution to a
plethora of relevant resources such as templates, custom layouts, and code snippets that
enable to build robust user interfaces in quick time and with minimum effort. It also
includes an overview of the future of Bootstrap, the next steps, and the myriad
compatibility with WordPress, Joomla, and the likes of it which make an imperative
framework for futuristic web design.
Bonus Chapter, Building an E-Commerce Website with Bootstrap, describes the
procedure to build a modern e-commerce website in a step-by-step format, which will
help you to understand the web designing aspects in a real-world scenario. This bonus
chapter is a sample example for readers who want to leverage the knowledge gained to
build enterprise-level websites with relative ease in a systematic and efficient manner.
This chapter can be found online at
https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/Buildin
g%20an%20e-commerce%20Website%20with%20Bootstrap.pdf.

Getting Started
with Bootstrap
The styling and presentation of your website is imperative, as it plays an important
role in creating a sublime user experience. Therefore, you need to acquire design
skills, which help you to create attractive websites. Add deadlines to the project
where time is imperative and you realize you have quite a task at hand. Several
toolkits and frameworks have come to the fore to ease and streamline the task of
web designing but none comes close to the open source framework, Bootstrap.
Since 2013, Bootstrap has become one of the most popular projects on the
code-sharing platform GitHub. It has good community support and a vast
ecosystem including templates and extensions built around it. With a modular
approach, Bootstrap saves you a considerable amount of time and effort allowing
you to focus on the core parts of your web development projects. Released initially
by Twitter to maintain consistency in their internal web designing and development
projects, Bootstrap has evolved and since the release of Version 3 has been licensed
under the open source MIT license.

Mobile-rst design
With the advent of mobile phones and tablets, responsive web design is the need
of the hour. Earlier, there was the graceful degradation approach wherein you
build a website for desktops and then remove features and adapt it for small
screen sizes with a lesser set of capabilities resulting in a watered down, subpar
browsing experience.

Getting Started with Bootstrap

With the release of Bootstrap 3, a mobile-first approach was implemented thereby

helping you to create websites that function efficiently on mobile platforms despite
the platform constraints. This included taking into account all the restrictions
of mobile devices and creating a website that is powerful with cross-browser
compatibility giving your website users an awesome mobile experience. Using
progressive enhancement techniques, you then add other features for desktop users
thereby increasing the accessibility significantly. Thus, your website is well-equipped
to handle changes regardless of whether you are using an iPad device, a Windows
PC, or any other platform of your choice.
Let's consider that we design a navigation bar for a web page. On a desktop screen,
the web page will be displayed as follows:

It is quite evident that the website displays the navbar brand Packt Publishing
alongside the menu options such as Books and Videos, Articles, Categories,
and Support with the search field on the right-hand side.
However, on a small screen mobile phone, the web page would be displayed
as follows:

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Chapter 1

On clicking the expandable mobile navigation icon displayed at the top right corner
of the mobile screen, the following screen will be displayed:

Thus, you can see the mobile-first approach of Bootstrap demonstrated by the
preceding screenshots.

Why Bootstrap
Bootstrap is "batteries-included", meaning that it brings along with it an incredible
responsive Grid system and Base CSS, including extensible classes for implementing
and enhancing styling for various elements ranging from typography, buttons,
tables, forms, and images to mention a few. With an extensive list of components that
consist of Glyphicons, responsive navigation bars, BreadCrumbs, Alerts, and much
more in addition to official plugins for Modals, Carousels, and PopOvers to name a
few, Bootstrap has you covered. With basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, you can
understand Bootstrap and implement it in your projects thereby making it a go-to
tool for web design.

[9]

Getting Started with Bootstrap

Let's now look at why Bootstrap is a promising framework for web design:

Reusability: In web designing, a modular pattern is favored as you do

not have to rewrite code for various portions of your design. Bootstrap
has ready-made components, CSS styles, and plugins that can be included
directly in your code. This aspect saves you a considerable amount of time
and effort resulting in rapid development. Moreover, this results in easy code
maintenance and helps you organize your code efficiently.

Consistency: Easy code readability is crucial for a designer. It also helps that
the designers working with you or assigned the same project can understand
the code well so as to implement modifications and alterations. As Bootstrap
uses ready-made code snippets and is compatible across different browsers,
there is a high degree of uniformity in your designing process. This also
lowers the learning curve for new designers who want to build on the
same project or implement a similar functionality on different projects.

Flexible grid layout: Bootstrap has a default Grid system that can scale
up to 12 columns with the relative increase in the screen size and with
the flexibility to opt for a fixed or fluid responsive grid. Apart from this,
Bootstrap is flexible as you can add any number of customized columns
that you may need on a row-by-row basis using its built-in LESS variables
and mixins. Using the variables and mixins, you can determine the number
of columns and the gutter width as well as the media query point, which
decides the threshold for floating columns in addition to generating semantic
CSS for individual grid columns. Offsetting and nesting can be implemented
easily, with a few lines of code. Using Media Queries and responsive utility
classes, you can also manipulate certain blocks of content by making them
appear or hide based on the screen size.

Customization: You can customize Bootstrap significantly using the built-in

Customize option, where you can choose the features that you want to use
and uncheck features you don't want, making it as bloat-free as possible. You
can use a Custom CSS sheet to override Bootstrap's default styles in addition
to using LESS files for CSS preprocessing. Using LESS, you can use variables
and mixins to alter almost every defined default attribute. Moreover, you can
customize the way plugins such as Modals and Alerts work using advanced
JavaScript. As SaaS compatibility and customization were introduced in the
latest version of Bootstrap, you can create complex and interactive websites
with Bootstrap.

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Chapter 1

Vibrant community with extensive third-party initiatives: Bootstrap has

an active community of developers as well as immense third-party support
wherein there is continuous improvisation. Bootlint, an HTML linting tool
for projects using Vanilla Bootstrap, was released recently, which helps you
identify incorrect Bootstrap usage errors. JavaScript frameworks such as
AngularJS are used in conjunction with Bootstrap resulting in the creation
of Mobile Angular UI specifically tailored for mobile-based designing.
Another recent development is the installation of Bootstrap using the Node
package manager. Bootstrap Bay (http://bootstrapbay.com/), Bootply
(http://www.bootply.com/), and Bootsnipp (http://bootsnipp.com/) are
some of the third-party websites that host a wide range of templates, editors
and builders, and tailor-made snippets that help you streamline your web
designing using Bootstrap.

Futuristic outlook and open development: The development of Bootstrap is

explicitly carried out on GitHub. You can follow all the changes implemented
and view the records of outstanding issues with the facility of reporting
Bootstrap-related errors and bugs, in addition to contributing to the future
development of Bootstrap. The project roadmap can also be found on the
official website along with facets such as backward compatibility among
the challenges to be addressed in the near future. Bootstrap is a framework
that incorporates HTML5 and CSS3 in addition to a plethora of toolsets and
utilities thereby shaping up to becoming a benchmark and a vital cog in the
wheel for futuristic design and development.

Summary
In this chapter, we had a look at Bootstrap and the reasons to incorporate it in your
web designing projects. You understood Bootstrap's mobile-first approach and its
relevance in this era where mobiles and tablets are increasingly becoming the first
medium for browsing the Web. In the next chapter, we will look at the different
ways to install Bootstrap in your projects, which also includes customizing it to
build impressive websites.

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Get more information Learning Bootstrap

Where to buy this book

You can buy Learning Bootstrap from the Packt Publishing website.
Alternatively, you can buy the book from Amazon, BN.com, Computer Manuals and most internet
book retailers.
Click here for ordering and shipping details.

www.PacktPub.com

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