Preface

Web development has changed. The days of opening a few text files in your editor of choice and then uploading them to the live site are long gone. Today’s web applications demand complex styling and functionality that only advanced CSS and JavaScript can provide. These assets get quite large and unwieldy, and the process requires a new workflow.

The JavaScript community has embraced Grunt, a powerful automation tool and task runner written in JavaScript, to handle these workflows. With Grunt, you can watch files for changes, concatenate CSS files and JavaScript files together, obfuscate or minify client-side code, run tests, and check your code for syntax errors, all automatically. Unfortunately, a lot of documentation on Grunt centers on copying and pasting various bits of code rather than focusing on how Grunt itself works.

This book will help you understand how Grunt works and show you how you can make it part of your development process. When you’re done you’ll be able to use Grunt on your own projects and build your own tasks and plug-ins.