Last year I published a little Bootstrap book. I immediately wanted to write a next, bigger one. To help me pull it off, I teamed up with my colleague Ian Whitley. We’ve written it. And it’s live.

We wrote the book for those who want to make use of Bootstrap without being constrained by it. Properly understood, Bootstrap is a tool — a truly excellent tool among other tools — meant to be used with a craftsman’s touch, toward an end defined by the craftsman, not by the tool.

Let’s break that down. If you’re like us, you want to:

1. Bootstrap your way to truly original designs.

You don’t want Bootstrap to define your design. “Built with Bootstrap” need not mean “looks like Bootstrap.”

2. Work directly with the LESS files.

Bootstrap’s LESS files are beautiful to behold. Through the course of these chapters, you’ll develop a truly modular workflow. You’ll use Bootstrap’s LESS files intentionally and selectively. And you’ll augment them with your own custom LESS files.

Even if you’re new to LESS, we would argue there’s no better way to learn than this. We’ll help you get from zero to serious fast.

(Nothing against SASS, by the way. We wrote the book before Bootstrap had an official SASS port.)

3. Leverage, then enhance, Bootstrap’s JavaScript.

Bootstrap comes equipped with JavaScript plugins for some of the most important and frequently used interface elements. We’ll walk you through the process of exerting detailed control over several of them. Beyond that, you may want to do additional things, such as add swipe interaction to the carousel for touch devices, animate the scrolling behavior for a single-page site, or add the PictureFill responsive image solution. We walk you through these things!

4. Optimize for performance.

While it is convenient to grab Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript from the online CDN, you realize that there are huge performance gains to be had by selecting only the styles and plugins you need and optimizing them for performance.

We walk you through a very manageable process for cutting things down to size. No more 120KB CSS files or 68KB JavaScript files. We’ll cut those numbers in half, or better, and we’ll work to keep the number of HTTP requests low.

Your sites will load faster. You’ll get better page speed results. Your users will be pleased.

5. Do the hard work to do good things well.

Bottom line: This book is for those willing to roll up their sleeves and dig into the guts of Bootstrap — the markup, the LESS, and the JavaScript — exerting thoughtful and careful control over the details — while creating mobile-first, user-friendly designs.

6. Oh, and Bootstrap yourself a custom WordPress theme!

I almost forgot to mention — we walk you through creating a custom WordPress theme based on the fantastic Roots Theme.

If you’re on board with these desires, this book is for you.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be supporting the book with helpful tips, recommendations, and code goodies. So stay tuned!

Bootstrap Site Blueprints
Packt Publishing, February 2014
Packt eBook (ePub, Kindle, PDF) or Print + eBundle
Buy Amazon paperback or Kindle edition