Michael Koltsov's den my cup of tea

/ books

Vue.js 2 and Bootstrap 4 Web Development book review

VueJS is the new kid on the block, though it might look familiar to most of frontend developers who had experience with Angular 1.x prior to that. And that's not an coincedence due to that VueJS author was one of the former core contributors to Angular therefore he claims that he took the features that we of the most importance to community and got rid of the unneccessary complexity that Angular 2.x presents as its features.

I can't agree more on that. For me as a former Angular addict VueJS looks like a breath of fresh air in comparison with React. React was a good thing in its times, it helped to educate frontend engineers who usually lack formal CS education therefore are prone to reinvent the wheel with every project they touch. React has brought a lot of fundamental CS concepts like immutabilty and referential transparency that they called "pure functions" to the attention of the Javascript developers. But if you're not a frontend developer than React will take a heavy toll on you as in my opinion it makes creating a simple app unbearably hard as you need to learn JSX, Redux and other things just to start. React ecosystem changes so quickly that it's not worth the effort to enter it as it could change at any moment.

Here VueJS comes into play. It has adapted some of the most valuable React features which is Redux in my opinion, but to write a VueJS app you don't need to know anything besides Javascript and HTML. It's unbelievable, but you don't even need NodeJS to write a frontend app in Vue.

Ok, let's go back to the book. The book is great, I can't say more about it. It reminds me of the Head First book series that was iconic to the IT newcomers back in the mid 2010's. Olga reminds Kathy Sierra a lot as they have a similar narratory style though Kathy usually gets in too much details as she expects her readers to have zero knowledge and Olga sometimes skips some of the concepts and gives a referrence to the book's complementary source code. It's hard to find it therefore I've made a fork that's will be more accessible for anyone https://github.com/mkoltsov/Vue.js-2-and-Bootstrap-4-Web-Development

The book gives a lot of practical examples on how to start writing actual webapps with Vue, it even goes to such extent as how to deploy it and manage its data.

My score is 5/5