Sean Lang - 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.
About This Book

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

Who This Book Is 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.
What You Will Learn

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

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.