Frontend development is changing. Websites are becoming richer and more
interactive, requiring us as frontend developers to add increasingly complicated
functionality and use more powerful tools. It’s easy enough to update a bit of
text on a page by using jQuery, but as we need to do more—updating large,
interactive sections of a page; handling complicated state; performing client-side
routing; and simply writing and organizing a lot more code—using a JavaScript
framework makes our jobs a lot easier.
A framework is a JavaScript tool that makes it easier for developers to create
rich, interactive websites. Frameworks contain functionality that enable us to
make a fully functional web application: manipulating complicated data and
displaying it on the page, handling routing client-side instead of having to rely
on a server, and sometimes even allowing us to create a full website that needs to
hit the server only once for the initial download. Vue.js is the latest popular
JavaScript framework and is rapidly increasing in popularity. Evan You, then
working at Google, wrote and released the first version of Vue.js in early 2014.
At the time of writing, it has over 75,000 stars on GitHub, making it the eighth
most starred repository on GitHub, and that number is growing rapidly. Vue has
hundreds of collaborators and is downloaded from npm about 40,000 times
every day. It contains features that are useful when developing websites and
applications: a powerful templating syntax to write to the DOM and listen to
events, reactivity so that you don’t need to update the template after your data
changes, and functionality that makes it easier for you to manipulate your data.
f you know HTML and JavaScript and are looking to take your knowledge to
the next level by learning how to use a framework, this book is for you. You
don’t have to be amazing at JavaScript, but I don’t explain what any of the
JavaScript in the code examples is doing beyond the Vue.js functionality, so it’s
good to have some basic JavaScript knowledge. The code examples are also
written using ECMAScript 2015, the latest version of JavaScript, and so contain
language features such as const, fat-arrow functions, and destructuring. If
you’re not familiar with ES2015, don’t worry—plenty of good articles and
resources can help you with it, and most of the code examples are pretty
readable anyway.