The Web App Path

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This book was written to help you create a web application fast. It was created for one or two-person teams that don't have a lot of experience but have an idea.

It walks you through creating a sample app that the author actually created for his own use. It is a nice, basic app that you should be able to adapt for your own needs.

Read the table of contents below for an overview of what's in the book, as well as the introduction, which has been excerpted from the book. You can buy the book at Amazon.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Tools
  • Framework
  • Getting Started
  • Login Form
  • Customizing The Form
  • Knockout Code
  • AJAX
  • Controllers
  • The App
  • Customizable Views
  • Navigation
  • Settings
  • Troubleshooting
  • Install Scripts
  • Save Favorite
  • Structure
  • Adding Purchases
  • Purchase Form
  • Browse
  • Faker
  • Editing
  • Edit Form
  • Reports
  • Conclusion

Introduction

Do you have an idea for a web app, but don’t have the knowledge to build it or the budget to hire someone to build it for you? If so, this book is for you. It will show you how to put together something quickly.

How quickly depends on your current knowledge level. For instance, I built this book’s sample app in three days, but I can't promise that you'll be able to build your app that quickly. It will help if you know the basics of HTML, PHP, JavaScript, and MySQL, but, if you don’t, you can pick these up as you go along.

Of course, it also depends on how complicated your app is going to be. The sample app for this book has a log in screen and a main app section with a form for entering data, a screen for browsing and editing the data, and a reports screen for getting a larger view of the data.

Here's the story of that sample app: Recently I’ve been spending a lot more money than I want to. At the end of the month, I know how much I’ve spent, but I don’t know where it’s going.

In the past, I used debit cards almost exclusively. So I could go back to my bank statements, and see what I spent on restaurants, gas, etc. Earlier this year, though, I moved from a developed country to a developing country. So now I use cash 99% of the time.

I need a way to track my purchases. True, I could probably find a web or mobile app that would do this for me. But I decided to build a little web app in order to learn some new technologies and to have something that does exactly what I want it to do.

You will build this app along with me. This will show you how apps come together. There is a big difference between building an app, and doing basic programming assignments. It took me awhile to get my head around it.

While we're building this app, I'll share a lot of tips and tricks, such as how to design your app, troubleshoot when things aren't working, and create sample data that you can use to test your app.

We also have a website for this book at www.webapppath.com. Please visit this website for more tutorials and the complete source code to our sample app.

Source Code