Web Development with Jade

Knowing Jade makes life simpler and more productive for web developers, and this book will teach you the language concisely and thoroughly using lots of practical examples and best practices for a solid grounding.

Overview

• Make your templates clean, beautiful, and reusable
• Use Jade best practices right from the start
• Successfully automate redundant markup

In Detail

Jade is a template engine for node.js and the default rendering engine for the Express web framework. It is a new, simplified language that compiles into HTML and is extremely useful for web developers. Jade is designed primarily for server-side templating in node.js, but it can also be used in a variety of other environments to produce XML-like documents such as HTML and RSS.

This practical, example-oriented guide will teach you how to write Jade, utilize its features, and recognize the best ways to organize templates in your projects. With this book, you will avoid the common pitfalls and issues with sparse documentation, allowing you to learn Jade faster and use it more effectively.

To understand Jade, we will first examine the reasons for its design and how these translate into a tool that can provide real benefits to you. You will develop confidence with each of the features of the language with the help of practical examples and thorough explanations. We will cover preprocessors, basic syntax, feeding data into templates, and incorporating logic. By the end of this book, you will be able to effectively use essential features such as filters and mixins as well as template inheritance through a block system. To tie it all together, we will also look at some of the best practices to follow when organizing your Jade projects.

Use this comprehensive guide to the Jade language to help you become a more efficient web developer.

What you will learn from this book

• Write cleaner, indentation-based markup
• Use logical statements to format data for display on the Web
• Avoid repetition by eliminating redundant operations
• Divide your templates into logical sections with blocks
• Avoid common organizational pitfalls when designing Jade-based projects
• Apply shorthand for brevity
• Utilize Jade for client-side templates
• Employ techniques like filters to quickly mock-up web pages in higher level languages like stylus or coffeescript

Approach

This is a step-by step, tutorial-based book which will enable web developers to explore the functionalities of Jade and learn how to use it to write certain functions and processes for web development.

Who this book is written for

This book is for web developers with at least a basic understanding of HTML and JavaScript. It will enable you to write an easier form of language that then compiles into HTML.