On the last day of my 24 days of Christmas from my upcoming book Front-end Development with ASP.NET Core, Angular, and Bootstrap I want to share the preface to the book written by Mads Kristensen, PM in the Visual Studio team at Microsoft.
The web becomes an increasingly capable platform with each new browser release. Tomorrow’s new features become available to early adopters while yesterday’s stabilize for mass adoption. This ever-growing toolbox of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript capabilities seems to be accelerating and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, it’s growing so fast that specialized tooling is required to take advantage of these new features – tooling such as WebPack and Gulp.
The amount of knowledge required to build modern browser applications is illustrated by the new job title “front-end engineer” – a term that didn’t exist just a few years ago.
In addition to the advances in the web platform, the server-side technologies powering the web are evolving as well. To provide the best experience for both end-users and web developers, the server-side platform must be ultra-fast, secure, cross-platform, cloud scalable and have great tooling.
Most web applications consist of client-side code running in the browser and server-side code running on one or more servers. So, to be a proficient web developer it is necessary to know enough of both client- and server technologies and that is a big challenge. Because how much is enough and how much time should we devote to continuously learning?
One way to make it easier for ourselves is to choose the right set of frameworks and tools to build our applications upon. Frameworks are useful because they usually wrap complex platform features into easy-to-use components, so web developers can focus on writing their applications logic instead of all the plumbing needed to work with the browser or server platforms.
Choosing the right frameworks is important. The options are many, but here are a few that have shown to be particularly well suited for building modern web applications. ASP.NET Core as the application framework for the server and Angular for the client is a great combination. Bootstrap makes sure the app looks good in all browsers and on all types of devices.
Simone has done a great job showing how these frameworks complement each other and how tooling provides a great development experience. In the fast-moving world of web development, it is good we have books like this to give us a pragmatic approach to building web applications using the latest and greatest in both client- and server technologies.
With this post I conclude the series. If you liked it, I encourage you to go pre-order my book and now enjoy you season holidays!