Introduction
Welcome to Hello Web App, the sequel!
A year ago, I wrote Hello Web App, a book that walks new programmers through building their own web app. It won’t help you get a degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, nor is it a guide to getting a job as a developer or an engineer. Simply, the book helps people learn how to build web apps.
Readers can decide what’s next after Hello Web App: learn more to become an engineer, hack on web apps as side-projects, or start building a lifestyle business or a startup (I did the last option and it turned out pretty awesome). Hello Web App is the next step in the learn-to-code revolution — beyond learning how to build a static website with HTML and CSS, we can build a fully functional web app and start working with customers.
All of this started after I taught myself — painfully — how to code half a decade ago (holy moly does time fly). I was a designer with an Art degree and loved doing front-end web development work. I had a lot of ideas for websites I wanted to build, but didn’t want to hire someone to do the back-end development work for me.
After a few months of learning, I was able to cobble together a basic web app from several Django tutorials on the web with copious amounts of help from my friends, and eventually launched a website. This website grew into my startup (and I the solo founder at the helm), which was accepted into a prominent startup accelerator and eventually raised funding.
During the years of refining my startup, I’ve learned more and more about web app development. The only tutorials available were frustratingly aimed at other developers — people who already knew how to code and who understood the jargon, references and side-notes. As I learned more development, I began to have mini-epiphanies: “Why the heck was it taught that way when it could be taught this way?” I realized that we needed a better way to teach web app development to those who didn’t already know how to code. After years of waiting for this to be built and seeing no progress, I decided to write the book myself.
Hello Web App was Kickstarted in 2014 and launched on May 4th, 2015. Since then, thousands of folks have used the Hello Web App tutorial to create their first web app. The goal was to write a short, easy introduction to web app development, meaning the original book is the size of a small paperback. Hello Web App takes you from creating a project idea to launching your app on the internet so you can start working with real customers.
Consider this book, Hello Web App: Intermediate Concepts, as the whipped cream on top of a basic web app sundae. The chapters here don’t rely on a chronological order, so you don’t need to go directly from one chapter to the next through the end of the book. Here, you can pick the chapter and concept you want to learn and just start building.
Also keep in mind that you don’t need to have read the original Hello Web App for this book to be of use to you. Got a basic Django web app and want to take it to the next level? This book is for you.
This book is not going to have a lot of Computer-Science-y acronyms and engineering concepts. There are a lot of tutorials out there that will teach you Computer Science theory and best practices. Here, you’ll learn how to do something from start to finish without a lot of asides and explanation about the why — just the how. And a tiny bit of theory.
We’re building web apps, so we can create cool side projects — maybe even starting a lifestyle business or becoming the next startup. Learning web app development will open up so many doors for you.
Prerequisites
As mentioned before, this is a follow-up to the original Hello Web App but experience with the original book is not required. Do you have a basic Django web app and want to build some of the topics this book covers, like payment functionality? I got you.
One side-note: This book references the command-line command touch to create
new files. Mac and Linux computers have this ability natively, but unfortunately
Windows computers don’t. Either create the new files in your code-editor of
choice by hand, or you can use Git for Windows
http://hellowebapp.com/ic/01, which installs Git
on your computer in addition to giving you a command line interface that lets
you do UNIX commands such as touch.
Our discussion forum
If you have any issues while going through this book and Googling your question isn’t giving you the answers you seek, check out the awesome Hello Web App discussion forum here: http://discuss.hellowebapp.com
Feel free to create a new topic if you’re stuck and I’ll pop in to help you within a few days (or some of the other awesome commentators may get back to you sooner). I also encourage you to share the app you’ve made for feedback, ask questions, or just say hi.
All right, let’s get started!