About the Author
David Cochran is Associate Professor of Communication at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. He and his students have a fondness for envisioning and producing exciting projects, with well-built standards-compliant websites playing a central role in them. David frequently publishes online tutorials to share insights gained in the course of those projects. In recent months, Twitter Bootstrap has been a key topic. You'll find a number of these tutorials at Webdesign.tutsplus.com and at his blog, aLittleCode.com.
I would like to thank my wife, Julie, and our kids. Thanks for riding through the busy times with grace. And thank you for the joy you bring. I'm grateful beyond words.
I would also like to thank my colleagues, students, and former students at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. You make learning and teaching a pleasure. I look forward to many more projects together.
About the Reviewers
Sree (aka Veturi JV Subramanyeswari ) is currently working as a solution architect at a well known software consulting MNC in India. After joining this company she served a few Indian MNCs, many start ups, R&D sectors in various roles such as programmer, tech lead, research assistant, and architect. She has more than 8 years of working experience in web technologies covering media and entertainment, publishing, healthcare, enterprise architecture, manufacturing, public sector, defense communication, and gaming. She is also well a known speaker who delivers talks on Drupal, Open Source, PHP, women in technology, and so on.
She has also reviewed other technical books such as Drupal Rules , DevOps , Drupal 7 Multi Sites Configuration , Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6 , Drupal 6 Module Development , PHP Team Development , Drupal 6 Site Blueprints , Drupal 6 Attachment Views , Drupal E-Commerce with Ubercart 2.x , Drupal 7: First Look, and Drupal SEO .
I would like to thank my family and friends who supported me in completing my reviews on time with good quality.
Chris Gunther is the co-founder of Room 118 Solutions, a web development consultancy based out of the New York. Chris is a web application developer, handling both frontend and backend development. He has contributed to many open source projects, including Bootstrap. Chris spends most of his time developing with Ruby on Rails.
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Preface
One of the joys of front-end web development is its culture of spontaneous generosity. Run into trouble achieving your desired design? Is browser X or Y causing you problems? Chances are someone has identified the problem, worked out a solution, and posted it with a demo and code samples. Google it up, tweet a thanks, post a comment, maybe even donate a buck, and you're fast friends on the road to some serious web design conquests.
Over the years this basic disposition has scaled itself up. From icon packs and gradient generators to grid systems and GitHub projects, our profession's culture of generosity has grown in sophistication. Need a great grid, thoughtful typography, expertly crafted buttons? Perhaps some user-friendly form elements? Can do. Here, there, and yonder, you'll find a plethora of tips, tools, and packs to get it done.
It's a beauty to behold.
Generosity meet cohesion!
Yet perhaps you've noticed an unintended consequence of this habitual generosity. The proliferation of tips, tools, recommendations, and solutions emerge from all across the web. When solutions come from every which way, things can become a bit chaotic. A certain amount of cohesion and consistency are important to design, including interface design. And yet cohesion and consistency often seem to be among the scarcest of resources on the Web. Not that this problem is a new one. The industry of mobile application design handles it by providing developers with Software Development Kits (SDKs) that include carefully honed, cohesive approaches to addressing the standard needs of interface design. The industry of web design, by contrast, has typically not enjoyed the widespread use of similar front-end development kits.
Not, that is, until Twitter Bootstrap.
When Twitter developers Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton first released Twitter Bootstrap in August 2011, they made a splash. Understandably so, as their framework supplied carefully crafted yet easily modified styles and scripts for the essential elements of a complete web interface. In January of 2012, Twitter Bootstrap 2.0 brought a number of enhancements, most significantly a responsive layout which adapted to desktops, tablets, and handhelds. Thus it has happened that, as of this writing, Twitter Bootstrap has quickly become the most watched of all GitHub projects, with more than 33,000 Github users watching itmore than twice the closest runner up. To emerge so quickly from a field of contenders which includes the likes of the HTML5 Boilerplate and the jQuery JavaScript library, this is no small feat. Given the rate of its growth and the size of its community, we may be forgiven for suspecting that we have something serious on our hands.