Jurie-Jan Botha - Grunt.js Cookbook

Jurie-Jan Botha has been immersed in the computer programming world from a very early age. He taught himself by working his way through textbooks and later (when it became available) through the Internet. Being involved in a variety of projects, such as games, content management, and telecoms systems, throughout his career has provided him with a fairly good insight into selecting the right tools for the job and making optimal use of them. He's been using Grunt extensively for the past 3 years and is looking forward to using it in the foreseeable future.

I would like to thank all my family, friends, and colleagues throughout the years, and more importantly, all those who contributed to the various projects in the open source community.

Alejandro Hernndez (aka picanteverde) is a full-stack JavaScript engineer (and JavaScript fanatic) devoted to spreading the use of JavaScript in ingenious ways. A JavaScript developer since 1997, Alejandro has worked on several JavaScript and web-related projects over the course of his career, learning and playing with new technologies (HTML5, Node.js, and ECMAScript 5, 6, and 7) as soon as they became available. Now he enjoys doing research on multiple browsers' interaction patterns using HTML5 features.

Alejandro worked in the research department for major companies such as Intel and Globant. Currently, he is a JavaScript specialist at Toptal LLC and helps companies take platform and architecture decisions in web environments in general.

I would like to thank my dear girlfriend, Carlita, whose support has always been my source of strength and inspiration; my family who have always been there for me whenever I needed them; and my friend Mauricio, who is always ready for a deep and complicated technical discussion on JavaScript.

Mark McDonnell currently works at the BBC as a senior engineer for the Responsive News project. He was originally hired as a frontend specialist focusing on the three tenets of web development: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Mark has moved further up the stack and can now be found working on applications in JRuby and PHP while shell scripting his way around multiple Jenkin CI servers and Vim/tmux'ing his way to the cloud utilizing the many AWS services via BBC's own internal abstraction layer: Cosmos.

Mark is an author of many online blog posts on Smashing Magazine, NetTuts, as well as his own website. He also has articles printed in the popular NET Magazine and is a published author with Apress with the title Pro Vim.

Along with honing his skills in classical object-oriented design and functional programming concepts from Lisp (in particular Clojure), Mark has aspirations of becoming a true polyglot developer one day.

You can find Mark online at the following locations:

Volodymyr Tsvang is a software engineer with a primary focus on web development. He's spent the majority of his time working on frontend, as well as backend, JavaScript projects. Volodymyr has been using Grunt since its earliest release. He's also the creator and an active maintainer of the Grunt plugin to compile Dust.js templates. Since 2012, Volodymyr has been working as a JavaScript developer at Under Development LLC, which is one of the greatest Russian software development companies.

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Preface

Grunt is a task automation tool that provides the platform for an ever-growing ecosystem of plugins. These plugins provide the actual implementation for the tasks that can be automated. File management, testing, deployment, template rendering, code generation, and much more can be automated using easily configurable tasks.

The Grunt platform's key strength lies in the simple methodology it has defined for task configuration, and the fact that all the plugins it supports tend to adhere to this methodology. This provides developers with a faster way to start using tools that would previously have taken more time to learn, while also presenting the configuration in a standard format that can be easily understood, manipulated, and shared.