Building Progressive Web Apps: Bringing the Power of Native to the Browser

by Tal Ater

Move over native apps. New progressive web apps have capabilities that will soon make you obsolete. With this hands-on guide, web developers and business execs will learn how—and why—to develop web apps that take advantage of features that have so far been exclusive to native apps. Features that include fast load times, push notifications, offline access, homescreen shortcuts, and an entirely app-like experience.

By leveraging the latest browser APIs, progressive web apps combine all of the benefits of native apps, while avoiding their issues. Throughout the book, author Tal Ater shows you how to improve a simple website for the fictional Gotham Imperial Hotel into a modern progressive web app.

Understand how service workers work, and use them to create sites that launch in an instant, regardless of the user’s internet connectionCreate full-screen web apps that launch from the phone's homescreen just like native appsRe-engage users with push notifications, even days after they have left your siteEmbrace offline-first and build web apps that gracefully handle loss of connectivityExplore new UX opportunities and challenges presented by progressive web apps

Genres: Website Design, Programming, Computer Science, Technology

434 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 8, 2017

Reviews

[Simon MacDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I knew I was going to like this book when it opened up with a quote from Patrick Rothfuss. After completing the book last night I can say I was not disappointed. Tal goes in depth into a number of issues like caching strategy for service workers and how to setup web push that are not well covered in any of the on-line readings I've done on PWA's.

Highly recommend this comprehensive book on PWA.

[Giacomo Debidda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even if this is quite an old book, it's still very relevant today because it focuses on the building blocks that make up a Progressive Web App: browser APIs like IndexedDB and Background Sync, the service worker lifecycle, offline-first principles. In the final chapters the author gives also some useful UX guidelines for PWAs.

[Lojza Tran · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book introduces PWA quite well. It shows all aspects of building a PWA. There's a complete example that goes through the whole book. That makes it easier to understand what is the topic about and how to use it in real life. The source code is also available on Github and if the reader has no clue how a code work in one chapter, the user can always skip to the next git tag to have the code available and working. P.S. the book is written in "she" style, which makes it bit distracting when reading.

[Aliaksandr Kulitski · Rating 3 out of 5]

В целом книга скорее смахивает на очень длинный и затянувшийся мануал Getting Started. Подходит лишь как знакомство с новыми браузерными API и не более того. Могла бы быть короче в 2 раза без потери в содержании.

[Justin Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was probably good for its time. However, I read it to teach a class on PWA in Fall 2024 and it is severely outdated. It either needs a new edition or to be removed from publication. Sadly, there just aren't many books on PWA available these days.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative although might be better off using MDN And Google Code labs since this book seems so out of date.

The example code did not age well.

"I have chosen not to use many of the modern ES2015 language constructs in this book so that you, the reader, could focus on the book’s subject matter, not on new syntax that may or may not be familiar to you. To see how the code in this book could benefit from ES2015,"

Okay so now someone like me who didn't do web programming back in 2015 and who has no clue about obsolete libraries like J Query has no clue about the syntax used.