Does anyone know a good tutorial for learning Grunt or Gulp? It seems like a lot of job applications require knowledge in at least one of these two technologies. Is one better than the other? Thanks for the help!
I hate Grunt. Others love it, and you may, too. You can probably learn both in a day.
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I’ll check them out! Thanks!
Neither. You should learn webpack. Especially if you work with react.
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I will look into it. Thanks!
I learned Grunt while learning to install and automate compiling Sass… While I like and still at the point need focused courses to learn something, I much prefer learning how to do some task / create a project where I need to learn something to get it done, cause theres a definite end goal in mind.
Anyway, I decided on Grunt for no other reason than it has a bigger community of users. Popular doesnt always mean better though, so I plan to also check out Gulp…seems people who prefer Gulp looove it. Hadnt heard of webpack before, but do want to learn React so Ill look into it too.
Basically, Im at a point where I know nothing, so I want to get a taste of whats out there so I can decide for myself what I like better.
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I was just about to make the same comment, but with sarcasm. “yet another thing” to learn is one of the most frustrating/appealing things about this profession. Sometimes I envy people that learned web dev before Node, React, Angular 1, Angular 2, Bootstrap, Flexbox, Sass, Webpack, Grunt, Gulp, and ES6 were things.
It would be nice to have several years and a deep understanding of just HTML, CSS, and JS then add all these shiny new things on top of the foundation as they were rolled out.
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- Grunt is conceptually easier (just fill in configuration), but the way it works means it’s quite slow, and it’s been effectively obseleted by newer technologies; it was the first first popular build tool. I wouldn’t start a new project with it, it’s moving towards being legacy technology.
- Gulp is fairly standard at the minute, and has the best support.
- NPM scripts are simpler than either of those if you are doing simple things (old post, still relevant: https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool/)
- Webpack is more useful going forward if you are building a JS app (rather than say just a website); it is built for building JS module bundles, it’s not just a taskrunner. Configuring it is mind-bendingly painful at times though the docs have improved a bit recently.
- Rollup is similar to Webpack, just a JS module bundler, but very simple to set up compared to WP. Can be a little buggy though.
- There are some other options, like Brunch (which is the simplest and fastest of the lot), but they’re less used so getting help if you have issues is generally much more difficult.
Thanks for the advice! I didn’t realize how many options there were.
Note that there seems to be slight settling down of tools if you’re building JS apps, driven by create-react-app - I’ve seen a couple more very similar tools appear recently, and I think that process will accelerate and be refined. What they give you is just a one-command install that sets everything you should need up. create-react-app is driven by webpack, but you never actually need to touch webpack configs at all - you run the install command to build your app, then run start, and it builds all the assets in the app, no config needed. If you’re going to look at using a framework at any point, then that’s the way forward, completely removes a lot of the headaches associated with setting up taskrunners.
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This video below made it clearer for me why even learn any…
To be honest, the more I learn, the more I dislike configurations, deployment tasks, and the like, but I do love me some coding!
I am with @cndragn on this, I will learn one of them when and if I need it to make my life easier. If so it will be grunt, because that is what they use in the Nonprofit projects I am participating in.
I am hoping I will only do pull requests and someone else in the team takes care of the rest 
@PortableStick, am I making sense?
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both grunt and gulp are outdated…(except maybe for legacy projects)
learn Webpack + npm…
2 free webpack course from the core team member of Webpack
Also , this course is pretty awesome too