Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Build a Frontend Web Framework From Scratch. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I’m looking forward to you getting the same feeling of accomplishment as I did when you see your own frontend framework—written from the ground up—power web applications. There’s something magical about building your own tools and seeing them working.

Throughout the book, you’ll learn the most important concepts behind what makes frontend frameworks such useful tools, but not through lots of theory, but by writing all the code yourself. To make the most out of this book, I’ll assume that you’ve got a decent understanding of JavaScript, Node JS and the Document API in the browser. You’ll start by writing an application using just JavaScript, without a framework. From that exercise, you’ll identify what are the pain points of writing applications without the help of a framework. It’s crucial that you understand the need for them in the first place; after all, we take them for granted these days. You’ll then create your own simple framework to address what you’ll discover is the main problem with vanilla JavaScript applications: the mix of DOM manipulation and business logic code.