Resources for Web Developers in 2022

Cascading Style Sheets bring order and beauty to our applications.

A grid item can also be a grid container! Let’s see how to specify a grid within a grid.

Nest a grid within a grid

webpack is a tool to build JavaScript modules in your application. To start using webpack from its cli or api, follow the Installation instructions. webpack simplifies your workflow by quickly constructing a dependency graph of your application and bundling them in the right order. webpack can be configured to customise optimisations to your code, to split vendor/css/js code for production, run a development server that hot-reloads your code without page refresh and many such cool features.

webpack

Poi can easily launch an `index.js` file simply by running the `poi` command. This will launch a dev-server and automatically reload whenever you make changes. You can also `npm install` any package you need and `import` it right away.

Use Poi to Build an Index.js with Modern JavaScript Features

Electron is a framework for creating native applications with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

electron

Code signing ensures that your app was created and distributed by you or your company and has not been modified since it was built. It is done via a special code signing certificate issued by a trusted authority. While you can distribute your Electron app without signing it; code signing is a security best practice and is a prerequisite to implementing auto-updates in your app. We’ll walkthrough how to integrate code signing into your electron-builder build process, what happens when you don't sign your application, and how to verify it's been signed correctly. 

This lesson assumes that you have already purchased code signing certificates from Apple and one of Microsoft's trusted vendors and have exported the certificate as a `p12` or `pfx` file. 

Code sign your Electron application with electron-builder

RequireJS is a JavaScript file and module loader. It is optimized for in-browser use, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code.

requirejs

RequireJS provides a clean way to load and manage dependencies for your Javascript applications. This video examines the first steps towards using RequireJS.

Introduction to RequireJS

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

Take your routing skills to the next level and learn to recover from errors, initiate downloads, and go beyond simple request and response. When we get a route that does not match we don't want the page to just error out. With `.redirect` we can send the user to an error page and display a helpful message.

We will go on to see how to download a file with `.download` and track behavior with `get.all`.

Handle Errors with a Redirect in Express

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Learn how to use the 'mapProps' higher-order component to modify an existing component’s API (its props). 'mapProps' takes incoming props and changes them however you’d like; for example, filtering the props by a field.

Transform Props by using the Recompose mapProps Higher Order Component

Learn how to use the ‘withProps’ higher order component to pre-fill a prop, unable to be overridden.

Lock Props by using the Recompose withProps Higher Order Component

WAI-ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications Suite, defines a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities. It especially helps with dynamic content and advanced user interface controls developed with Ajax, HTML, JavaScript, and related technologies. 

aria

Icon buttons are very common in web applications, yet they often have accessibility problems. Learn how to make your icon buttons accessible to keyboard and screen reader users with HTML, CSS, SVG and ARIA.

Accessible Icon Buttons

Once users are using your app, you need a way to ship new features and fixes to them. In this lesson, we’ll learn how to implement auto-updates in your app, which allows you to distribute updates to your application seamlessly. We'll go over how to integrate with Electron's `autoUpdater` module to check for an update and display a prompt to update once it's been downloaded. For our server side implementation we'll just use a plain file server to keep things simple. 


Ship updates to your Electron app with `autoUpdater` (Mac)

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

In this lesson Ben shows you the basics of dynamically scaling your charts in D3. Scaling is a deep concept, so this is the first video in a series that will cover this topic.

Scaling Basics

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format for two-dimensional graphics with support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since 1999. SVG images and their behaviors are defined in XML text files.

svgo

Just like a bitmap image, you can compress an SVG by removing various pieces of code that aren’t necessary to it rendering properly. This reduces file size & download time, ultimately leading to a faster page load speed. You’ll learn how to automate the process of compressing your SVGs using `svgo` in the command line.

For a full list of options and plugins available to use with `svgo`, [check out their documentation](https://github.com/svg/svgo).

Note: This lesson assumes you have `npm` installed.

Optimize SVGs for Better Performance using svgo

In this lesson, we'll go over a few differences in implementing auto-updates on Windows like handling `Squirrel.Windows` startup events and configuring `electron-builder` to build for a `Squirrel.Windows` target.

Ship updates to your Electron app with `autoUpdater` (Windows)

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

typescript

TypeScript definition files can be an extremely confusing topic to tackle due to the sheer variety and of features and libraries they need to cover. This lesson helps you understand definition files, how they're used, and where to find them based on many different scenarios.