Vue.js Up and Running: Building Accessible and Performant Web Apps

Frontend development is changing. Websites are becoming richer and more interactive, requiring us as frontend developers to add increasingly complicated functionality and use more powerful tools. It’s easy enough to update a bit of text on a page by using jQuery, but as we need to do more—updating large, interactive sections of a page; handling complicated state; performing client-side routing; and simply writing and organizing a lot more code—using a JavaScript framework makes our jobs a lot easier. A framework is a JavaScript tool that makes it easier for developers to create rich, interactive websites. Frameworks contain functionality that enable us to make a fully functional web application: manipulating complicated data and displaying it on the page, handling routing client-side instead of having to rely on a server, and sometimes even allowing us to create a full website that needs to hit the server only once for the initial download. Vue.js is the latest popular JavaScript framework and is rapidly increasing in popularity. Evan You, then working at Google, wrote and released the first version of Vue.js in early 2014. At the time of writing, it has over 75,000 stars on GitHub, making it the eighth most starred repository on GitHub, and that number is growing rapidly. Vue has hundreds of collaborators and is downloaded from npm about 40,000 times every day. It contains features that are useful when developing websites and applications: a powerful templating syntax to write to the DOM and listen to events, reactivity so that you don’t need to update the template after your data changes, and functionality that makes it easier for you to manipulate your data. f you know HTML and JavaScript and are looking to take your knowledge to the next level by learning how to use a framework, this book is for you. You don’t have to be amazing at JavaScript, but I don’t explain what any of the JavaScript in the code examples is doing beyond the Vue.js functionality, so it’s good to have some basic JavaScript knowledge. The code examples are also written using ECMAScript 2015, the latest version of JavaScript, and so contain language features such as const, fat-arrow functions, and destructuring. If you’re not familiar with ES2015, don’t worry—plenty of good articles and resources can help you with it, and most of the code examples are pretty readable anyway.