Tom Owens - Webpack 5 Up and Running: A quick and practical introduction to the JavaScript application bundler

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Tom Owens is a seasoned web developer with over 11 years of industry experience. He graduated from Liverpool John Moores University with a BA (Hons) and an FdA. Later, he would graduate with an MSc from the same institution. His career primarily began as a freelance web designer, which granted him industry experience around numerous related new media fields, including game development and, later, frontend development. He would eventually move into internet entrepreneurship, having garnered a great deal of knowledge in offering consultancy to highly successful individual entrepreneurs. After this, he was offered a role as Lecturer in Web Development for a private institution called SAE, who offered degrees to BSc (Hons) and BA (Hons) students, in partnership with Middlesex University London in the United Kingdom. This would help him cement himself as an expert in his field. He continues to have a passion for coaching and mentoring to this day. He is an active tutor, understanding the benefits of tutoring over lecturing, as it allows the structure to be more fluid, adapting to the bespoke needs of each student. He intends to bring that skill set to the fore in this book.

Sonny Recio is an experienced developer with a seven-year track record of commended performance in software engineering. He recently built his team and solved technical problems on web and mobile apps for his clients.

Nowadays, Sonny spends more time learning and doing frontend development and creates rich user experiences in his projects, aside from managing his team and getting the hang of the business side of things.

He loves using React and is a big fan of functional programming. He reads books related to philosophy, biology, health, art, design, technology, and business in his free time.

Rajat Kumar is an engineer at Netflix, Inc. and has worked with many start-ups and Fortune 100 companies in the last 14 years. He regularly contributes to several open source projects and maintains Restify, an open source framework, built on Node.js.

Rajat enjoys writing code in JavaScript because he believes JavaScript has complexities and imperfections that mimic the real world. Currently, he is driving the architecture behind Netflix's dynamic asset bundling system built on top of webpack.

AaronCzichon is Head of Software Development at Conclurer GmbH, as well as a conference speaker, author, and trainer with a focus on Node.js and web components.

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When I was asked to write this training book, I realized that very little was known about webpack and its purpose. It is generally something a developer stumbles upon and learns on the job, which can be a very laborious process. There is some documentation on the Webpack.js website as well as a handful of credible resources such as Medium. However, these resources do tend to speak to the reader from the point of view of an expert and I, for one, found this not to be ideal.

Coming from the background of being a lecturer in web development, I have seen how very skilled and intelligent people can have blind spots and knowledge gaps. As a lecturer, I was advised, and also relay the message on, that there are no wrong questions. Many people who have not come from a teaching background might suggest they don't want to speak down to you and would prefer you not ask the wrong questions. We have found this is harmful if a student would rather remain silent over asking questions.