Learning to Program

4. Build Tools

Note

Project: Use Grunt to build your Chrome Extension, concatenate files, and check code quality.

The last two chapters were dense and difficult, but hopefully not boring. You learned a lot about how computers work and how software works. Those chapters had a lot of theory and not as many practical examples. You made it through, though, so congratulations are in order. Good work!

As with nearly every job, programming is full of repetitive tasks. Code needs to be compiled, files need to be moved from one directory to another, tests need to be run, test data needs to be created and refreshed, supporting code needs to be compiled and executed, and the list goes on. Each time a programmer performs one of these tasks, he or she ...