When I signed up for my mandatory WebAssign account in order to turn in my math homework this semester, I paid the extra $20 to gain access to Cengage Unlimited, the textbook publisher's library of ebooks, for a period of four months. That's long enough to finish my math class, but not long enough to really get use out of having a library of textbooks at my fingertips. Still, I've put a few books on my digital bookshelf for the time being and am trying to familiarize myself with Bootstrap and AngularJS to start.

For some reason, I always hesitate before diving into a non-vanilla version of JavaScript. Maybe it's because I feel that my knowledge of JS by itself isn't actually very developed. Either way, even though I've poked around with Node.js servers a few times, I've never actively developed anything with it, and my knowledge of AngularJS extends about as far as knowing that it is a thing that exists in this world. What makes it better than plain JavaScript? What is it particularly suited to? I suppose this book will have to tell me the answer to these questions. (Or, you know. I could Google it. But what fun would that be?)

I like the fact that the textbook author is clearly workign on a Mac. So often books are hyper-focused on the Windows paradigm. I understand why; if I hadn't gotten this laptop as a Christmas gift, I'd have bought myself a budget Windows Laptop and would be dual-booting some Linux variant to get my Unix fix. Still, it's nice to see my problematic fave OS represented in a programming book. Until now, I think I've only ever seen Mac-first instructions when playing around with the Jekyll preprocessor. (Can you tell I bounce from project to project without actually building much?)

Anyway, let's see where this ride takes me. I know I need to get with the times and learn how to work with the frameworks that are powering the modern web, and hopefully this is a step in that direction.