Fluent Web Development

Chapter 1. JavaScript Tooling

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 2nd chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

One of the greatest strengths of the web is that its core technologies — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — are both the tools you write and the tools the browser runs. The same file you author is the same file the user’s browser executes. There’s no complicated build step or translation layer by default: what you write is what you run. And if you have been around for a while, you have heard the stories of “F5 development,” where the only tool you needed was the reload button to show if your change is already visible. This immediate connection between writing and execution not only makes web development accessible but also encourages experimentation, creativity, and rapid iteration.

Nowadays, and not only do tools automatically reload the browser for us when there has been a file change, but they also do a lot of work until the file actually runs in the browser. JavaScript dialects, supersets, and transpilers have become the norm. Writing code today often means interacting ...