Welcome to this review of the Pluralsight course Bootstrap 3 by Shawn Wildermuth.

Shawn is a 14-time Microsoft MVP (ASP.NET/IIS) and is involved with Microsoft as an ASP.NET Insider, ClientDev Insider and Windows Phone Insider.

He is the author of eight books on software development, and has given talks at a variety of international conferences including TechEd, Oredev, SDC, VSLive, DevIntersection, MIX, DevTeach, DevConnections and DevReach.

Bootstrap 3 is the final course in the learning path Front End Web Development.

Also in this series:

Part 1 – Why Bootstrap?

Part 2 – Getting Started

Part 3 –  Basics

Part 4 – Bootstrap Components

Part 5 – Plugins

I found that not very much pre-requisite knowledge is required for this course.

You’ll need to have some previous experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but Shawn explains Responsive Web Design from the beginning and so there is no obligation to watch the earlier courses on RWD and mobile first.

You should also be able to benefit from just watching part of the course, if you are in a hurry, or if you already have some experience with Bootstrap and just want to learn certain aspects of it.

In this course, there is no absolutely no server side programming.  At first, I was not quite on the right page with this, thinking “why would you want to hard-code that? Why not use a CMS here?” etc.

This was just me overthinking. The point of this course is not to teach application architecture or anything other than Bootstrap. We focus entirely on the different looks that we can achieve with different bootstrap classes and HTML. This makes the course particularly easy to understand.

The following information should help you to identify the sections of most interest to you.

I have found that although Bootstrap only takes a minute, or even just a few seconds to add to your site, creating great looking sites, whether you use Bootstrap or not, is an art that takes significant time and focus to master. This course will teach you all of the most important Bootstrap 3 concepts.

Let’s get started.

Why Bootstrap 3?

After a quick introduction to the course, Shawn starts with the key question: why should you spend your time learning Bootstrap 3?

There are a number of answers to this.

He begins by saying that not every project has a designer.

My team is small, and produces web applications and other software without the aid of a designer for the most part. We adopted Bootstrap 3 a few months ago and we have never regretted it. It’s a big productivity boost, and there are times when what it gives you just looks better than what you would otherwise have.

He introduces us to lingscars.com, a site that is so terrible, it’s kind of appealing. It made me laugh anyway.

Bootstrap also helps us with Responsive Web Design – writing websites that look good on any size screen, and automatically adjust to optimize the screen size available.

Shawn explains how almost every site uses common components, which means they could share a common framework or library.

Next Shawn explains what Bootstrap is: part CSS, part JavaScript, modular, and supporting most of the common UI functionality that you’re likely to need.

Shawn does a super quick whistle-stop tour of Bootstrap 3: listing all of the major features.

Next he discusses the mobile web and how it is at least as important as desktop web nowadays. He says building your website again for mobile is a waste of your time. Instead we now do Responsive Web Design (RWD)

This concept is fully explained, including the use of media queries (for more information on media queries see CSS3 In Depth). He explains the drawbacks and failures of traditional RWD.

Shawn describes the difference between RWD and Mobile First RWD, which Bootstrap embraces. Mobile First RWD began with Luke Wroblewski’s Progressive Enhancement article in 2011.

Shawn explains that versions of Bootstrap prior to version 3 were not mobile first.

He urges that the default templates should be used only as a basis and not as the final look for your site.

We see several good and bad examples of Bootstrap on the web.

Continue to Part 2 – Getting Started