Learning Web App Development

Chapter 1. The Workflow

Creating web applications is a complicated task involving lots of moving parts and interacting components. In order to learn how to do it, we have to break down these parts into manageable chunks and try to understand how they all fit together. Surprisingly, it turns out that the component we interact with most often doesn’t even involve code!

In this chapter, we’ll explore the web application development workflow, which is the process that we use to build our applications. In doing so, we’ll learn the basics of some of the tools that make it a manageable and (mostly) painless process.

These tools include a text editor, a version control system, and a web browser. We won’t study any of these in depth, but we’ll learn enough to get us started with client-side web programming. In Chapter 2, we’ll actually see this workflow in action as we’re studying HTML.

If you’re familiar with these tools, you may want to scan the summary and the exercises at the end of the chapter and then move on.

Text Editors

The tool that you’ll interact with most often is your text editor. This essential, and sometimes overlooked, piece of technology is really the most important tool in your toolbox, because it is the program that you use to interact with your code. Because your code forms the concrete building blocks of your application, it’s really important that creating and modifying it is as easy as possible. In addition, you’ll usually be editing several files simultaneously, so it’s ...