What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introducing Grunt, explains exactly what Grunt is and why we would want to use it. Then, instead of starting at the very beginning, we temporarily jump ahead to review a set of real-world examples. This gives us a glimpse of what Grunt can do, which will help us to see how we could use Grunt in our current development workflow.

Chapter 2, Setting Up Grunt, after finishing our forward escapade, we jump back to the very beginning and start with the two primary technologies surrounding Grunt: Node.js and its package manager—npm. Then, we proceed to installing each of these tools and setting up our first Grunt environment. Next, we learn about the package.json and Gruntfile.js files and how they are used to configure a Grunt build. We will also cover the various Grunt methods used for configuration and the types of situations where each is useful.

Chapter 3, Using Grunt, extends on what we learned in the previous chapter, to the use and creation of tasks that consume our freshly made configuration. We will cover tasks, multitasks, and asynchronous tasks. We look in-depth into the task object and how we can use it effectively to perform common file-related actions. Finally, we review running Grunt tasks and methods that customize Grunt execution to our benefit.

Chapter 4, Grunt in Action, begins with an empty folder and gradually constructs a Grunt environment for a web application. Throughout this process, we use various examples from Chapter 1, Introducing Grunt, make use of the configuration strategies from Chapter 2, Setting Up Grunt, and include some extra features from Chapter 3, Using Grunt. At the end of this chapter, we shall be left with a Grunt environment that compiles and optimizes our CoffeeScript, Jade, and Stylus, and deploys our resulting web application to Amazon's S3.

Chapter 5, Advanced Grunt, introduces some of the more advanced use cases for Grunt; these introductions are intended to be purely an entry to each topic while providing the resources to learn more. We briefly cover testing with Grunt, Grunt plugins, advanced JavaScript, development tools and more.