Ajdin Imsirovic - Elm Web Development

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Ajdin Imsirovic has been working with frontend technologies, as well as web and print design, for almost 2 decades. He is an accomplished video course creator and the author of Bootstrap 4 Cookbook, by Packt Publishing. In his second book, Elm Web Development, he eases in the newcomers to the Elm language in several fun projects.

Jasmin Djedovic is an experienced programmer focusing mainly on C++, C#, and the Elm language. He works as a teaching assistant at the faculty of electrical engineering at the University of Tuzla. He also works as a full-stack developer in a fintech company, working on multiple desktop applications used in stock exchange trading.

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Elm is a wonderful functional programming language for frontend web development. There are a number of reasons why learning Elm will be a useful and enjoyable experience.

Elm is easy to get started with. The learning curve is not too steep. Elm does not introduce an overwhelming amount of new concepts to understand and learn; actually, it is quite the opposite. Once you learn the Elm way of doing things, with the focus on some key concepts of functional programming, there is not a huge number of new topics to understand.

It can be a great way into the more advanced concepts of functional programming. It's probably among the easier ways to start thinking in terms of the functional programming paradigm.

Even though is it easy to learn, the return on investment is pretty high; imagine all the time you will save not having to do JavaScript-style debugging! In the long run, this ROI compounds. The way that Elm achieves this is by having no runtime errors. All the errors are caught at compile time (so you can forget about things like undefined is not a function on a live project). Compile time is very fast. Also, Elm has one of the friendliest and most helpful compilers around.

If you are a bit tired of JavaScript and want to look at alternatives, you will most likely love Elm. Along the same lines, if you have had trouble trying to make up your mind about whether you should learn Angular, or React, or Vue, or any other JS framework, Elm is a viable alternative.

If you are learning React, understanding the Elm architecture will help you wrap your mind around Redux. An interesting bit of trivia: Redux was inspired by the Elm architecture.

If you already have some experience with JavaScript, it will give you a new perspective on it, and actually make you a better JavaScript developer. You can even use Elm and JavaScript together! Elm interops with JavaScript so you can use both languages side by side in your projects.

Elm is declarative. Scaling your Elm apps is actually a pleasant experience. Elm has a great community and excellent documentation.

This book was written with the goal of introducing a complete beginner to the Elm language with some of its basic concepts and taking those concepts and building simple web apps in Elm from the get-go.