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Preface

This book aims to be an introduction to Alpine.js, a very cool library you can use to provide client-side interactivity to your pages in an easy way.

If you’re unfamiliar with JavaScript or TypeScript, before reading this book I highly recommend reading my handbooks on those topics.

This book was published in late 2024.

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Flavio Copes, 2024. All rights reserved.

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Introduction

Alpine is a lightweight frontend library that I've used with a lot of happiness, specifically to add client-side interactivity to a page.

Things like "if I click this button, show this modal" or "close the modal if I click outside of it", which are always kind of unfriendly to do with vanilla JavaScript and DOM APIs. Not hard, but I have to think a bit about how to do some things, while with Alpine, it's very straightforward.

Compared to most UI libraries you see these days, like React, Svelte, Vue, Angular, and so on, Alpine is A LOT simpler, and it's 100% focused on so-called "JavaScript sprinkles", which are little bits of interactivity.

As opposed to taking control of the entire UI like most of those bigger frameworks tend to do (although you can also use them for tiny portions of a web page).

Alpine is 100% focused on this, and it's very good at it.

In this book I'll explain the basics of Alpine, so you can learn the fundamentals of this super handy library.

To learn more, the official documentation is the best place to go: https://alpinejs.dev/start-here