Welcome

Hugo in Action: Static sites and dynamic JAMstack apps MEAP V04 cover

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Hugo in Action. I hope that this book helps you in sharpening your web development skills and provides you with success using Hugo and the JAM stack. To get the most benefit from this book, you will want to have some experience with programming, an understanding of common web terminology and some skills working with HTML and CSS. With this book you can take these skills to create a website with great performance and a very minimal ongoing maintenance overhead.

Hugo has been constantly ranked amongst the best static site builders in the last five years. It can compile a website in seconds and provide a huge and powerful standard library for writing templates. It has a strong community focused on building websites with high quality and great performance. I have crafted my personal website using a wide set of technologies from hand coded PHP to a WordPress instance. Then I migrated it to Jekyll and finally to Hugo. With Hugo, I have found a fine balance of features and performance. It is a framework that can help you focus on the joys of building websites. You will find yourself free from the ongoing frustrations of waiting for the live reload system to start or of updating and fixing security issues in the hundreds of plugins that your website relies on. With the core of the website standing on a stable framework, you can focus your efforts on utilizing the powers of Javascript and APIs for enhancing rather than maintaining your website.

This book navigates through the various hats a person needs to don to setup a modern website. In the first few chapters the readers will play the role of a content creator, an editor and a manager of an active Hugo based website. Through the middle of the book we will delve into theme creation, playing the role of the web developer to setup a beautiful website offering great performance. Towards the later half of the book, we will play the role of an integrator, a backend developer and an architect to setup a system which involves contacting first and third party services to enable server controller dynamic functionality in a primarily static website. This book navigates through the entire JAM stack starting with the Markup based pieces that form the core of the website and developing onto APIs and JavaScript.

The JAM stack has been the best stack for use in small websites including those belonging to individuals and small businesses. Cheap hosting along with freedom from day to day DevOps work make this ideal for websites that are ancillary to one’s business. Even web based businesses are recognizing the power of this approach with more and more companies deciding to use markdown for the static portions of their website with the dynamic portions done using JavaScript talking over a clean API.

Please let me know your thoughts on my approach to helping you learn Hugo using the liveBook's Discussion Forum. Your feedback has the power to change the course of the book and I am keenly waiting for your comments.

Thanks again for purchasing Hugo in Action MEAP.

—Atishay Jain