Beautiful Front End Code
June 27 - 29, 2012 in Chicago, IL
This 3-day intensive course will forever change the way you develop the front end of your web applications. For too long, many web developers have approached front end code as drudgery. No more! We'll help you build the skills to write front end code you can love every bit as much as your server side code.
What will I learn?
Jasmine
Before you can even begin to write good front end code, you need to treat it with the same loving care as your back end code. Of course, this means Test (or Behavior) Driven Development, and Jasmine is the framework of choice here. We'll dig in and give you a thorough understanding of Jasmine, including:
- matchers
- spies and mocks
- working with jquery and the DOM
Coffeescript
This "little language that compiles into JavaScript" has a truly lovely syntax for exposing all the awesome that was hiding in javascript the whole time. We'll explore all the features that let you shed the noise and let the intent of your code come shining through. We'll cover:
- Installation
- language features
- integration with exiting JS frameworks
- debugging
Backbone.js
Beautiful code is well organized code with a clear separation of concerns, and backbone.js gives us a place for everything, with everything in it's place. In this part of of the course, you'll learn backbone by doing. We'll gradually build a rich client web application (with jasmine specs of course) that gives you a chance to use all the pieces of backbone.js, including:
- Views
- Models
- Routers
- Templating frameworks
- Integration with Rails, including the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline
