Starting out as a Web Developer Part 2

The sample application: The website for organizing books

Femi Oni
Femi Oni
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

This part 2 of the ‘Starting out as a Web Developer’ series. Please read part 1 ‘The Explanation’ to catch up. In this lesson we layout what is required to develop the application and what the users can do with the application and you my friends will be naming the app.

Web development is a very wide topic that cannot be squeezed into any tutorial series(i think). The aim of picking the Book Shelve application is that it, hopefully, will allow us cover as much of basic web development as we need to set you off on the path to becoming a web app ninja. From the most commonly used concepts such as Forms, Meta tags, Tables, Buttons, Images, Lists, HTML Document structure, linking between pages, and layouts, to learning styling concepts: aligning elements on a page, applying a set of styles to either just one element or a group of elements, using background colors, using different text size and format to indicate action. And finally we will learn data types such as strings, arrays and numbers, functions, how to display items in a list format and in a table format depending on what the data looks like, how to react to user interaction with elements on the page, submit forms and save data collected from the form and many more.

Required Tools

To be able to follow along with this exercise, and you are very much encouraged to do so, assuming you are reading this from a computer, you will need what is called an editor to write your codes in. Editors are specially designed Software to help writers and programmer easily organize and format their write-ups or in our case code and prepare them for publishing. There are many code editors out there, some come with a price tag, others are free. I will recommend you install either Microsoft VSCode or Adobe Brackets. They are both free, both work on most common operating systems, they are easy to use and are very powerful tools.

Code editors

You will also need a browser: Chrome, Firefox or Edge. If you are reading this article from one, Mazel tov!

How the Application will work

Books will be categorized by subjects e.g Mathematics, Sci-Fi, Business, Architecture, Tragedy, Comedy ….. The books will be arranged on shelves according to the category they belong to. Multiple shelves may contain books belonging to the same category, i.e Comedy books may be arranged in more than one shelve because the store have a lot of them and cannot fit them in a single shelve. They also keep multiple copies of same books.

So the managers need to create categories, label shelves by categories, register new books and lastly they need to keep track how books are sold and how to search books by authors, categories, year published.

Are you excited? then lets get coding! Are you unexcited but still want to learn? lets get coding still :-( . Drop your suggestion for the name of the application in the comments section below.

Femi Oni

Written by

Femi Oni

Former FrontEnd @Engineer Field Intelligence(@vonfield), Currently @Andela. Special interest in PWAs

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