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Build Websites with Hugo:Fast Web Development with Markdown
Rediscover how fun web development can be with Hugo, the static site generator and web framework that lets you build content sites quickly, using the skills you already have. Design layouts with HTML and share common components across pages. Create Markdown templates that let you create new content quickly. Consume and generate JSON, enhance layouts with logic, and generate a site that works on any platform with no runtime dependencies or database. Hugo gives you everything you need to build your next content site and have fun doing it.
Published: 2020-05-10
Release: P1.0 (2020-05-06)
ISBN: 978-1-68050-726-3
Database-driven sites bring complexity you might not need, but building a site by hand is too much work. Hugo is a static site generator and web development framework that creates content sites quickly without the overhead or dependencies of a dyanmic web framework. With Hugo, you use HTML templates and Markdown to build static sites you can host anywhere, letting you use the skills you already have.
Develop your own theme using standard HTML and CSS, using Hugo’s powerful templating features to organize your site’s components. Create your site’s content with HTML or Markdown and use Hugo’s content templating features to build new content quickly. Build a fully-featured blog with archive pages, tagging, and pagination, and integrate an external commenting system to provide interactivity. Use data from front-matter, site-wide configuration, and external JSON sources to add content, and generate JSON others can use. Integrate JavaScript with your site to create a search engine. Get Hugo working with Webpack so you can leverage the wider web development ecosystem, and explore ways to publish your site to various services. Finally, learn how you can move your existing content site to Hugo.
Dive in and build your next site with Hugo!
Published: 2020-05-10
Release: P1.0 (2020-05-06)
ISBN: 978-1-68050-726-3
Database-driven sites bring complexity you might not need, but building a site by hand is too much work. Hugo is a static site generator and web development framework that creates content sites quickly without the overhead or dependencies of a dyanmic web framework. With Hugo, you use HTML templates and Markdown to build static sites you can host anywhere, letting you use the skills you already have.
Develop your own theme using standard HTML and CSS, using Hugo’s powerful templating features to organize your site’s components. Create your site’s content with HTML or Markdown and use Hugo’s content templating features to build new content quickly. Build a fully-featured blog with archive pages, tagging, and pagination, and integrate an external commenting system to provide interactivity. Use data from front-matter, site-wide configuration, and external JSON sources to add content, and generate JSON others can use. Integrate JavaScript with your site to create a search engine. Get Hugo working with Webpack so you can leverage the wider web development ecosystem, and explore ways to publish your site to various services. Finally, learn how you can move your existing content site to Hugo.
Dive in and build your next site with Hugo!
- GenresProgrammingWebReference
147 pages, ebook
Published May 10, 2020
21 people are currently reading
31 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
May 16, 2020
I use Hugo for quite some time, but I was missing a few things. This book felt like a missing manual. It starts from a dummy level, gradually introducing more advanced Hugo features, chapter by chapter. For me, it made the interaction between archetypes, templates and themes more clear.
It inspired me to partially automate restaurant reviews and recipes. I really appreciated the part on rendering JSON from static data or web services. This inspired me to render some data obtained from google takeout, especially my Google maps restaurant reviews.
However, there is one part I really have to warn for. Hugo has a builtin development web server, that can be used to preview your work. In the book it is suggest to expose this webservice, on your laptop on your home or business network, to the world via proxy service to allow a friend or colleague to briefly see your work. This exposes your laptop and your home or business network to hackers on the internet.
The part on getting your Hugo site hosted expresses 3 example ways of hosting:
1. Using Netlify with your source material in github.
2. Via S3
3. Via your own web server
Although Netlify is great, I would have appreciated a 4th, slightly more complicated, approach of using GitHub as a hosting services not only for the source material but also for the published sites. This is free and can limit the number of 3th party services needed. I currently run 3 web sites this way. I admit, I use Travis as a build service, but I think that can be eliminated nowadays by using what is provided by GitHub/Microsoft.
It inspired me to partially automate restaurant reviews and recipes. I really appreciated the part on rendering JSON from static data or web services. This inspired me to render some data obtained from google takeout, especially my Google maps restaurant reviews.
However, there is one part I really have to warn for. Hugo has a builtin development web server, that can be used to preview your work. In the book it is suggest to expose this webservice, on your laptop on your home or business network, to the world via proxy service to allow a friend or colleague to briefly see your work. This exposes your laptop and your home or business network to hackers on the internet.
The part on getting your Hugo site hosted expresses 3 example ways of hosting:
1. Using Netlify with your source material in github.
2. Via S3
3. Via your own web server
Although Netlify is great, I would have appreciated a 4th, slightly more complicated, approach of using GitHub as a hosting services not only for the source material but also for the published sites. This is free and can limit the number of 3th party services needed. I currently run 3 web sites this way. I admit, I use Travis as a build service, but I think that can be eliminated nowadays by using what is provided by GitHub/Microsoft.
February 18, 2021
Calling this one done even though I only skimmed the last couple chapters. I've read a few other reviews that were critical of the approach here, but honestly, if you want to understand how Hugo works and not just have a simple "how-to" guide, this is not a bad place to get it.
September 14, 2023
Honestly, not that bad. I enjoyed reading the book as a first introduction to Hugo, but the deeper I got into the book, the more lacking it felt.
1.) The book is both shallow and dense. It's shallow in the sense that you're told to do things without being told why. You can skim the book quickly to get a sense of what you'll be building, and what the goals are, but the nitty-gritty details that make the difference between your code compiling and looking the way you want are often buried deeply and innocuously in the middle of paragraphs. No bolding or importance callouts help alert you when you're about to read something crucial, and in fact, crucial facts lie buried all over the text. I often had to reread blocks that I didn't know were important until after my site broke, because the shallowness and brevity of the overall text lulled me into a false sense of security. Examples include how to structure directories, where to put themes, layouts, when to title HTML files with an underbar like _index.html, what goes in static and what goes in default, what overrides the theme, what specific periods mean inside double curly braces, and what combinations are legal. Tags and keywords like where and range are introduced haphazardly, as if they were everyday occurrences we can just absorb in action, but they merited a deeper definition and examples. Sure, a simple cookbook do-this-then-that instruction manual is good if you just want to build something cool by the book, but the site we're building in this book is not cool. It requires much more iteration and improvement post final chapter. As an introductory text, you have to explain anything potentially new, including esoteric commands and Hugo-specific terminology, particularly when crucial to how the site turns out, so the reader can later know how to customize it.
2.) The site you build as a sample is way too plain and undesirable. I like that we built it from scratch, chapter by chapter, piece by piece, but if this is meant to be an introductory site and theme, then the priorities are out of order. There is minimal coverage of creating a desirable looking gallery of images, a portfolio, or anything but plain walls of text. Even by the end of the book, I didn't feel rewarded with what I built and felt tempted to just grab a theme off https://themes.gohugo.io/ because of how overly simple the example looked. It doesn't need to be a masterpiece, but the book should teach us to build something desirable, with more imagery and color, than a searchable blog. I never would have picked up the book if I knew I had to learn all these complicated terms just to build a glorified Blogger text journal. Readers need some more motivation and idea of the extent of what's possible with Hugo to keep them going.
3.) No index or glossary at the back makes it hard to pinpoint specific topics, or even just to revisit a point in the book off a keyword. For example, as I was debugging a Hugo site after finishing the book, I wanted to revisit the section on image captions, but the lack of an index meant I had to thumb through the book looking at notes, highlightings, and related topics to find the section on captioning an image.
The book provides a good intro, but it's paper thin. Literally and figuratively. It seems quick and fast to read, but it's also quick and fast skipping over key commands and details, that are then hard to reference because of the lack of structure and glossary lookup.
Hugo needs a better, more comprehensive and well-organized introductory text. This is not it!
1.) The book is both shallow and dense. It's shallow in the sense that you're told to do things without being told why. You can skim the book quickly to get a sense of what you'll be building, and what the goals are, but the nitty-gritty details that make the difference between your code compiling and looking the way you want are often buried deeply and innocuously in the middle of paragraphs. No bolding or importance callouts help alert you when you're about to read something crucial, and in fact, crucial facts lie buried all over the text. I often had to reread blocks that I didn't know were important until after my site broke, because the shallowness and brevity of the overall text lulled me into a false sense of security. Examples include how to structure directories, where to put themes, layouts, when to title HTML files with an underbar like _index.html, what goes in static and what goes in default, what overrides the theme, what specific periods mean inside double curly braces, and what combinations are legal. Tags and keywords like where and range are introduced haphazardly, as if they were everyday occurrences we can just absorb in action, but they merited a deeper definition and examples. Sure, a simple cookbook do-this-then-that instruction manual is good if you just want to build something cool by the book, but the site we're building in this book is not cool. It requires much more iteration and improvement post final chapter. As an introductory text, you have to explain anything potentially new, including esoteric commands and Hugo-specific terminology, particularly when crucial to how the site turns out, so the reader can later know how to customize it.
2.) The site you build as a sample is way too plain and undesirable. I like that we built it from scratch, chapter by chapter, piece by piece, but if this is meant to be an introductory site and theme, then the priorities are out of order. There is minimal coverage of creating a desirable looking gallery of images, a portfolio, or anything but plain walls of text. Even by the end of the book, I didn't feel rewarded with what I built and felt tempted to just grab a theme off https://themes.gohugo.io/ because of how overly simple the example looked. It doesn't need to be a masterpiece, but the book should teach us to build something desirable, with more imagery and color, than a searchable blog. I never would have picked up the book if I knew I had to learn all these complicated terms just to build a glorified Blogger text journal. Readers need some more motivation and idea of the extent of what's possible with Hugo to keep them going.
3.) No index or glossary at the back makes it hard to pinpoint specific topics, or even just to revisit a point in the book off a keyword. For example, as I was debugging a Hugo site after finishing the book, I wanted to revisit the section on image captions, but the lack of an index meant I had to thumb through the book looking at notes, highlightings, and related topics to find the section on captioning an image.
The book provides a good intro, but it's paper thin. Literally and figuratively. It seems quick and fast to read, but it's also quick and fast skipping over key commands and details, that are then hard to reference because of the lack of structure and glossary lookup.
Hugo needs a better, more comprehensive and well-organized introductory text. This is not it!
May 30, 2021
I prefer books over online courses and videos to study. Books help me concentrate, except when they are badly written eg. no editing or proofreading, lots of coding errors, typos, no indentation, ...
However, this book is the best technical book I have read in 2020. It is well written, it takes you by the hand to guide you from complete beginner to an intermediate level, it has been proofread and edited (I had to look really hard to find a couple of typos), it gives you inspiration for your own site, ...
I am going to start building my own site and blog now and publish a more in-depth review as one of my first posts.
Read 2nd time while I was working on a personal site.
However, this book is the best technical book I have read in 2020. It is well written, it takes you by the hand to guide you from complete beginner to an intermediate level, it has been proofread and edited (I had to look really hard to find a couple of typos), it gives you inspiration for your own site, ...
I am going to start building my own site and blog now and publish a more in-depth review as one of my first posts.
Read 2nd time while I was working on a personal site.
September 7, 2020
I wanted to try Hugo, but was feeling too impatient to wade through the reference materials on the site, and the quick starts weren't giving me what I needed. Hogan's book does what a book about a framework should do: get you up and running with a sample that works, and goes beyond the very basic. After 2/3 of the way through I felt that I could start converting my site to Hugo and find what I needed in the reference docs.
September 18, 2023
Really good book. If you are new to Hugo, this book is enough to deep dive fully into SSG (static site generator). Really intuitive explanation and easy to read. You can use this book as the reference everytime you stuck about something. Almost every basic things in Hugo featured in here.
Recommended
Recommended
April 4, 2021
Everything you need to get started with Hugo quickly. In a couple of days, I can work on my own Hugo projects.
April 25, 2024
The easiest source of information on Hugo.
December 9, 2024
A must read if you want to use Hugo to build your web sites. Well-structured, to the point and full of helpful tricks.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews