Table of Contents for
Electron in Action

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Electron in Action by Steve Kinney Published by Manning Publications, 2018
  1. Cover
  2. Electron in Action
  3. Copyright
  4. Electron in Action
  5. Brief Table of Contents
  6. Table of Contents
  7. Preface
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. About this book
  10. About the cover illustration
  11. Part 1. Getting started with Electron
  12. Chapter 1. Introducing Electron
  13. Chapter 2. Your first Electron application
  14. Part 2. Building cross-platform applications with Electron
  15. Chapter 3. Building a notes application
  16. Chapter 4. Using native file dialog boxes and facilitating interprocess communication
  17. Chapter 5. Working with multiple windows
  18. Chapter 6. Working with files
  19. Chapter 7. Building application and context menus
  20. Chapter 8. Further operating system integration and dynamically enabling menu items
  21. Chapter 9. Introducing the tray module
  22. Chapter 10. Building applications with the menubar library
  23. Chapter 11. Using transpilers and frameworks
  24. Chapter 12. Persisting user data and using native Node.js modules
  25. Chapter 13. Testing applications with Spectron
  26. Part 3. Deploying Electron applications
  27. Chapter 14. Building applications for deployment
  28. Chapter 15. Releasing and updating applications
  29. Chapter 16. Distributing your application through the Mac App Store
  30. Code from the end of chapter 6
  31. Index
  32. List of Figures
  33. List of Tables
  34. List of Listings

Preface

Electron is one of the technologies that I’m most excited about right now. That excitement is something that I hope you catch on to as you read Electron in Action. As I’ll explain ad nauseam throughout this book, Electron allows web developers the ability to create desktop applications with capabilities that are not available in the browser. It allows you to create graphical user interfaces for our command-line tools, opening our creations to a wider audience that may not be familiar with the terminal. Electron enables you to build applications with web technologies that you couldn’t build otherwise.

Electron hits a sweet spot that’s rare in open source. It’s low-level enough that you will quickly wrap your head around the basics, and powerful enough to allow you to build incredibly sophisticated applications. It abstracts over some of the more tedious things you’d need to do to build a desktop application, while not falling into the trap of relying on too much black magic. The platform is supported by an enthusiastic community that has provided libraries that will help you accomplish a wide range of features with ease.

You might have heard of Electron through Atom, Slack, Visual Studio Code, or any of the other big-name applications that use it. But I wrote this book for the hobbyist or indie developer who wants to build something original and new. Electron is popular among larger teams, but it’s also great for the single developer who wants to build an application that only they might use, or for the small team that needs to build tools for internal use.

It’s a tool that, as you become familiar with it, opens up new avenues that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. When you’re becoming comfortable with Electron, it immediately seems cool, but it might be hard to come up with a use case at first. Let it sink in, and you’ll soon catch yourself walking down the street coming up with ideas for applications you can build.

That’s how it happened for me and I’ve taught Electron to enough people to develop a strong suspicion that that’s how it will work for you as well. Electron in Action came to be as I was traveling around the United States and to Colombia, teaching workshops on building cross-platform desktop applications with Electron. Manning invited me to write a book on the topic and I jumped at the opportunity. The book informed the workshops, and delivering the workshops gave me new insights that helped improve the book.

If left to my own devices, I would have kept refining this book in perpetuity. It has helped me clarify my own thinking about building Electron applications and became a working diary as I tackled new challenges and implemented features in my projects. It’s a virtuous cycle that I’ll miss, although, I will be happy to have my nights and weekends back.