Welcome to The Book Of fastn
and ftd
, an introductory book about fastn
and ftd
. fastn
is software stack that helps you create web-applications and build websites with ease.
Learning a programming language from scratch, and building full stack web applications or websites, deploying them is not an easy task. Programming is almost exclusively done by people who are pursuing a career in programming or aspiring to. Within tech companies and tech teams you will find most non developers can not program at all.
Programming is considered hard, and is hard if you are using current state of art technologies. The programming languages are not designed for ease of learning. They are not even designed for building UI or web applications. To build a full stack application, that is easy to maintain, is months or years of learning.
fastn
and ftd
aim to make it easy. They are designed so a person with zero prior programming experience can create and deploy their first website or web-application within a few hours of learning, and yet remain maintainable for a large web project.
fastn
and ftd
for the next billion programmers. We believe ability to program, to build an application that helps you improve your life, should not be limited to software professionals, and software companies, but for people at large.
In just a min, you can learn this, and your life is improved. Once you learn the formula language, you can keep learning incrementally to keep improving your life.
fastn
and ftd
let’s you do the same, learn a very little, and start getting small benefits, and learn more to get larger benefits. Compare that with the experience with Python, one of the fastest growing languages, which is considered easy today. The hello world program in Python is easy but unfortunately does not let you benefit your life must. Or rather, you can benefit a little bit, but as soon as you want to move to a little bit more, say want to show a UI, you have to suddenly learn a lot more. The learning from print("hello world")
to import django
and “just use React or jQuery” is not an easy journey and most people fail to cross it unless thay have decided to devote serious efforts in programming.fastn
and ftd
are for?fastn
and ftd
are ideal for many people for a variety of reasons. Let’s look at few of the most important groups.fastn
And ftd
Are Under Active Development! 🚧Before you proceed please keep in mind that both the technology, and this book are in active development. Some teams are using fastn
, ftd
in production, but it is not ready for prime time.
We recommend you use fastn
and this book for learning purpose only, and wait for a more stable release from us before using it in production. If you want to still brave through, which we hope some of you do, please read this book and use our fastn
and let us know your feedback.
fastn
and use ready made UI component libraries available in fastn
to quickly create pages without added developers to the loop.fastn
and ftd
to build user interfaces for their dashboards, APIs etc. They can use fastn
for their blogs, resume, knowledge bases etc.Designers can use fastn
color system described in TODOth chapter, and import fastn
color scheme and font pairing packages to quickly change the look and feel of their designs.
Designers can also publish their own color and font packages to help the community.
Designers also need to prototype their designs, and use prototyping tools. Instead if they convert their designs toftd
, they get browser ready UI they they can deploy on static hosting providers. For a lot of purposes these ftd
prototypes can go in production as is. Prototypes done by ftd
also are a lot more powerful, one can easily make API calls, add animations, add functional components written by the community.Data analytics professions often rely on Notebook applications to share their data visualisations and data stories. fastn
is a good alternative to build their stories into more flexible designs, use from open source component libraries, color schemes and typography work done by designers.
Startups, like marketing teams have to create a landing page, pricing page, knowledge base pages, documentation pages and so on. Startups can easily adopt and customise ready made designs made available by increasing community of ftd
developers and designers.
fastn
and ftd
for their main product user interface as well.fastn
and ftd
can be used to build such user interfaces as fastn
, ftd
are easier to learn, are content focused.A lot of people can benefit by learning how to make quick web pages and mini web apps. If you do data munging in Excel, you can easily convert them to fastn
, use our increasing component libraries to quickly create web pages and apps based on that Excel data.
Students should lean rudimentary programming to be able to setup web pages and basic web apps for themselves, thier projects, their schools, friends, families, communities and so on.
Getting started with and making full stack websites and web apps is really easy withfastn
and ftd
, a good alternative for students.This book assumes you have very little to no programming experience. The book assumes you are comfortable with computers in general, downloading things from internet, installing software, editing files etc.
One of the inspiration for this book is my niece, as 12 year old, she wants to learn what I do. To follow along with this book you will need access to a Windows, Mac or a Linux machine. You can either use a Desktop or a Laptop.One advice that I got early in my life and has stuck with me is to not learn things alone. Find a friend, maybe your better half, maybe a kid or parent, and learn together, having someone you can discuss things with, who is at your level and figuring things out togther has really helped me, and may be it will you too. If you do not know of someone in real life, maybe find someone on our Discord channel: #book-club where others are learning fastn
and ftd
and following along this very book.
In general, this book assumes that you’re reading it in sequence from front to back. Later chapters build on concepts in earlier chapters, and earlier chapters might not delve into details on a particular topic but will revisit the topic in a later chapter.
You’ll find two kinds of chapters in this book: concept chapters and project chapters. In concept chapters, you’ll learn about an aspect of fastn
, ftd
and even programming in general. In project chapters, we’ll build small programs together, applying what you’ve learned so far.
Chapter 1 explains how to install fastn
, how to write a “hello world” program, how to publish it on the web. Chapter 2 is a hands-on introduction to writing a program in fastn
, having you build a UI that responds to some events. Here we cover concepts at a high level, and later chapters will provide additional detail. If you want to get your hands dirty right away, Chapter 2 is the place for that. Chapter 3 covers data modelling in ftd
, how to think in data and how to model them properly. Chapter 4 covers how to build user interfaces.
Chapter 5 takes teaches you about how to think about website and web app designs. It introduces our style system, and takes you through various customisations you want to do. It also tells you how to use existing design resources to kick start your project.
Chapter 6 teaches you how to integrate with HTTP APIs. How you can load during page load, or based on user events. It takes you through form handling, error handling etc use cases.
There is no wrong way to read this book: if you want to skip ahead, go for it! You might have to jump back to earlier chapters if you experience any confusion. But do whatever works for you.Have a question or need help?
Visit our GitHub Q&A discussion to get answers and subscribe to it to stay tuned.
Join our Discord channel and share your thoughts, suggestion, question etc.
Connect with our community!We welcome you to join our Discord community today.
We are trying to create the language for human beings and we do not believe it would be possible without your support. We would love to hear from you.