September 2025
Intermediate to advanced
206 pages
5h 50m
English
Content preview from Building Web Apps with Bolt
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Chapter 1. Introduction to Bolt.new and Prompt-First Development
Software development is undergoing a quiet revolution. Traditionally, building a web or mobile application meant writing code line by line, carefully crafting each function and UI component. But what if you could simply describe the app you want to create and have those descriptions turn into a working application? This is the promise of Bolt.new, an AI-powered development tool and the core idea behind prompt-first development. In this chapter, we’ll introduce Bolt, explore what it enables you to do, and explain how prompt-first development changes the way we build software.
What Is Bolt?
Imagine sitting down with a skilled software engineer and explaining your app idea in plain language. You might say, “I want to build a recipe app that lets users search for recipes, view ingredients and instructions, and save their favorites. It should have a modern, clean look, with appetizing photos for each recipe.” The engineer listens and then starts writing code to make it happen. Bolt works a lot like that engineer, except the conversation happens between you and an AI. Bolt is a web-based development environment where you tell the computer what you want to build using natural-language prompts. The AI then writes the code, sets up the project, and even runs the app for you right in your browser.
Bolt was created by the team at StackBlitz as an experiment in radically accelerating application development. It allows you to ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.