The Mastro Guide – web development simplified.

New to web dev? Or only learned a specific framework, but never the fundamentals?

• 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 if you prefer, using the command line).
• 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 part of this guide, you’ll run a server with a REST API, learn about bundling and 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 about 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. HTML, CSS and JavaScript
   1. Ways to build a website?
   2. Why learn HTML and CSS?
   3. Setup: GitHub and VS Code for Web
   4. Start with HTML
   5. Publish your website to GitHub Pages
   6. Style with CSS
   7. Introducing JavaScript
2. Static site generation
   1. JavaScript: client-side vs server-side, SSG vs SSR, SPA vs MPA
   2. Server-side components and routing
   3. A static blog from markdown files
   4. Third-party packages
   5. Interactivity with JavaScript in the browser
3. Running a server
   1. URLs and HTTP
   2. Mastro as a server on the command line
   3. Deploy server or static site with CI/CD
   4. Forms and REST APIs
   5. Bundling and pregenerating assets
   6. Caching, Service Workers and streaming
   7. Web application architectures