What’s in This Book

This guide is meant to be a quick overview of Grunt, using hands-on examples to illustrate its features.

We’ll start out by looking at the very basics of Grunt, defining some simple tasks as we build our first Gruntfile. We’ll create basic tasks, create tasks that take in parameters, chain tasks together, and document tasks. Then we’ll look at Grunt’s built-in tools for working with files and folders on the file system.

After that we’ll look at multitasks, a feature of Grunt that lets us define a single task that can have multiple output targets. This is useful for file conversion and other tasks where you might need to create separate distributions from a single source.

Next we’ll use several Grunt plug-ins together as we configure a workflow to develop a modern single-page web application with CoffeeScript and the AngularJS framework. We’ll cover conversion, minification, and file watching so you can see how easy Grunt makes automating important repetitive tasks.

Then we’ll look at what it takes to create our very own plug-in for Grunt. This will give us a chance to explore how Grunt can leverage Node.js and external programs, as well as how to break Grunt tasks into reusable modules.

And finally, we’ll use Grunt to create project scaffolds. We’ll play with existing plug-ins and then we’ll create our very own project template that we can use when we start our own web projects.

In addition, each chapter gives you suggestions for further exploration, offering you the opportunity to dig deeper into Grunt.