Making Mobile Web Apps Guided by "Mobile First Bootstrap": A Book Review

I was on a quest for front-end development framework that's built on top of jQuery so that it will be portable across various browsers and theoretically resolved the differences and individual quirks of various popular browsers, and the final item after clearing out the list is Bootstrap 3, all the more is that it's designed with mobile platform first so I can finally work with a better front-end tool than jQuery Mobile.

What's next once we have Bootstrap 3 on hand? Well, we need a guide, preferably a book to help us go through this new fancy power tool for front-end developers and luckily for us, with the generosity of Packt Publishing, we were again given the opportunity to review another new book, this time it's "Mobile First Bootstrap" by Alexandro Magno that was published before the close of 2013 so this is really hot off the press!

I was again surprised to find the eBook to be less than 100 pages so I really have to do justice to the book by being brief in my review as well.

The double plus of the book is that aside from being less than 100 pages, the major components like the grid system, web forms, icon library, responsive web design and mobile first-ready navigation are covered. Another plus is that being from Packt, once you go and login to bit.ly/Jy2th6, you will have access to the source files of the activities discussed in the book, saving you typing time and enjoying chock full of sample code. To fully understand the examples in the book, it's highly recommended to download the code samples from the Packt Publishing website.

The non-plus I found is the discussion of Ruby and Jekyll, along with Bower and Node.js which seems out of place as contents in this book since they were not elaborated from setup to configuration in the book, even the mention of using Modernizr, if only very briefly, could have been more elaborate to further help newbies in using these supporting libraries, but on a re-read of the content, the discussion of these related technologies were more relevant to those who plan to contribute or rebuild Bootstrap 3 to suit their needs. Aside from these minor issues, using Bootstrap 3 for front-end development should be a breeze.

Overall, if you have to quickly dig deep on mobile first front-end web development using Bootstrap 3, this should be the book you have on hand.

Update: I apologize not to have answered the important question: How do I get me a copy? Buy and download your copy straight from Packt here, also available in printed copy.