Firebug 1.5: Editing, Debugging, and Monitoring Web Pages

Arm yourself to destroy UI and JavaScript bugs

• Expand your toolkit by learning to use Firebug to help you monitor, debug, develop and edit web pages on the fly
• Create your own Firebug extensions and learn about popular third-party extensions
• Covers JavaScript, AJAX, and CSS development
• Covers all of Firebug's features
• Clear explanations with easy-to-follow examples of HTML and JavaScript

In Detail

With the advent of RIA (Rich Internet Applications), most web pages are driven by a combination of JavaScript, AJAX, CSS, and so on. Web developers and designers find it hard to debug and fix the issues that crop up on the client side. Firebug is a wonderful toolkit to have in your arsenal for handling all such issues. This book covers all of Firebug's features and will help you utilize its capabilities with maximum efficiency. AJAX development and debugging is not one of the easiest tasks; this book explains step-by-step, how to develop and debug AJAX components in your web page in a very easy way, thereby increasing your productivity. Topics like performance tuning of the web page are covered in detail.

This book discusses how to become more efficient in various aspects of web development by using Firebug. It is a very easy-to-understand, step-by-step guide that explains all the features of Firebug with concise and simple examples. With this book in hand, you will be able to deal with the painful areas of web development like JavaScript and AJAX debugging using Firebug.

The book takes you from the basics of Web Development like editing HTML and CSS on the fly to advanced features like AJAX, JSON, Monitoring, and Performance Tuning of web pages. It assumes that you have some very basic knowledge of HTML and JavaScript. For those of you with a sound knowledge of these technologies, this book can help you increase your productivity by using Firebug effectively, taking full advantage of its rich and powerful features and the console API. Towards the end, the book explains how to create your own powerful extensions for the Firebug community.

This practical guide will equip you with the skills to edit, debug, and monitor web pages using Firebug

What you will learn from this book

• Explore Firebug's tabs and their functions
• Understand how to use Firebug to inspect, edit, search, and play with the HTML source of the document
• Get to grips with useful tools and utilities provided by Firebug for CSS development
• Learn the command-line API and console API of Firebug and debugging JavaScript
• Modify the values of properties and constants of any DOM object using Firebug
• Discover various ways to analyze the performance of your web application on the browser
• Learn how to track XmlHttpRequest and Response as well as debugging AJAX calls
• Tips and tricks to experiment with the features that Firebug provides
• Explore Firebug extensions like YSlow, FireCookie, and Page Speed that are useful for development and Performance tuning
• Develop a Firebug extension and learn how to set up a development environment, file, and directory structure for it

Approach

A step-by-step description of each key feature is provided with the help of simple, easy-to-understand examples. There are plenty of useful screenshots in each chapter. Every chapter contains information as well as tips and tricks to draw your attention towards some useful information or reference. Each aspect of web development like CSS or JavaScript is handled independently so that you can refer to those modules in which you are interested.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for frontend web developers building software and pages using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX, who want to learn Firebug for the reasons outlined above. The book assumes that readers have a very basic knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. The examples in the book can be understood by someone who has just been introduced to web development.

Chandan Luthra

Chandan Luthra is a Software Development Engineer with IntelliGrape Software, New Delhi, India-a company specializing in Groovy/Grails development. He is an agile and pragmatic programmer and an active participant at local open source software events, where he evangelizes Groovy, Grails, Jquery, and Firebug. Chandan is a Linux and open source enthusiast. He also involves himself in writing blogs and is an active member on various tech-related mailing lists. He has developed web applications for various industries, including entertainment, finance, media and publishing, as well as others.

He loves to share his knowledge and good coding practices with other team members in order to hone their development skills. In his free time, he loves to contribute to open source technologies.

Chandan also loves to code in jQuery and Firebug, which makes development very easy for him. He is a very fond user of Firebug and has been using it since 2007.

Deepak Mittal

Deepak Mittal is a software developer based in New Delhi, India, and he has been involved with software engineering and web programming in Java/JEE world since the late 1990s. Deepak is a Linux and open source enthusiast. He is an agile practitioner and speaks about open source, agile processes, and free software at various user group meetings and conferences. He has designed and built web applications for industries including pharmaceutical, travel, media, and publishing, as well as others. He loves to explore new technologies and has been an early-adopter of quite a few mainstream technologies of today's world.

In early 2008, he co-founded IntelliGrape Software, an agile web application development company focused on Groovy and Grails. At IntelliGrape, he has been occupied with building world class applications on Grails and also mentors and trains other team members.

Deepak is a veteran user of Firebug and has been using it since 2006.