Build Your First Web App: Learn to Build Web Applications from Scratch

Not a techie? Don’t worry! This friendly and approachable guide shows even complete beginners how to build their first web application.
Modern web application design and development can feel overwhelming: How do you design a useful tool that can run on a desktop, tablet, and phone? Which programming framework should you use? How can a non-programmer pick up these skills? Build Your First Web App answers these questions by teaching two popular practical frameworks, Bootstrap and Angular.js, as well as the principles behind programming: the basics of user experience design, planning and structuring your software, and making your application visually attractive and easier to use. The book walks you through every step of creating you first app, and gives you assignments in each chapter. If you already know some HTML and CSS, but want to go further and create something functional rather than static, this book is for you!

Book includes:

• An overview of the app design planning process—scenario development, feature/flow design through wireframing, and user research.
• Quick tips for adding visual design intelligently to make the application easier to understand and use.
• A walkthrough of how to code a sample app using a responsive framework (Bootstrap) and Angular.js. Each chapter of the book covers a different part of the sample app, allowing readers to follow along and draft their own code.

Deborah A. Levinson has worked for more than 20 years providing expert user experience design and consultation, usability testing, and content assessment to software companies, higher education, and nonprofit institutions, including MIT, Furman University, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the Mind and Life Institute. She has also taught introductory responsive web coding and jQuery to design students at Northeastern University. Debby is an MIT graduate and the co-author of Visual Usability: Principles and Practices for Designing Digital Applications (Morgan Kaufmann) and The MIT Guide to Teaching Web Site Design (MIT Press).
 
Todd Belton started programming computers in elementary school. Today, he primarily writes middleware to glue large databases to web applications. In his spare time he writes things that are not code, and plays more computer games than he cares to admit.