The goal of this book is to provide you with practical experience and guide you through setting up, configuring, building, and distributing Electron applications. You are going to learn how to build multiple projects, address common challenges and pitfalls, and how to integrate with modern JavaScript frameworks and underlying toolchains.

In this chapter, you are going to get a brief overview of the Electron framework, its history, and its architecture. You will learn how to get all the prerequisites installed for multiple platforms, get your first Electron project up and running with Node.js and NPM, and learn how the apps are packaged for various platforms.

By the end of this chapter, you should have a basic project template so that you can complete future practical tasks.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What is Electron?
• Preparing a development environment
• Creating a simple application
• Packaging for multiple platforms