The Mastro Guide – web development simplified.

Are you new to web development? Or perhaps you learned a particular framework, but never the foundations of building on the web? Fear not, the first couple of chapters will show you the basics of modern HTML and CSS: build a website and put it live – all in your browser (or using the command line, if you prefer that).

In later chapters, you’ll statically generate a blog, and implement a to-do list app: once with plain client-side JavaScript, then reactively. In the last third, you’ll run a server with a REST API, learn about caching, and discover some of the design space around different web application architectures.

This guide does not show you everything you’ll ever need to know when creating websites. Instead, it shows you the door to the world of web design, giving you an overview over the landscape, and tells you where to learn more. While the minimal Mastro framework is used for practical examples, the patterns discussed are universal.

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Table of Contents

1. Intro: Why learn HTML and CSS?
2. Setup: GitHub and VS Code for Web
3. Start with HTML
4. Publish your static website
5. Style with CSS
6. Client-side vs server-side JavaScript, SPA vs MPA
7. Introducing JavaScript
8. Server-side components and routing
9. A static blog from markdown files
10. Third-party packages
11. Interactivity with JavaScript in the browser
12. URLs, HTTP and servers
13. Setup Mastro on the command line
14. Deploy server or static site with CI/CD
15. Forms and REST APIs
16. Bundling, pregenerating assets and caching
17. Web application architecture and the write-read-boundary