Should I learn Bootstrap in 2023?

Everyone has their own opinion. Some people hate Bootstrap and would say don’t learn. It’s not worth it. In my opinion, pretty much everyone who deals with the front end should learn it because it’s very easy to learn. I mean, it’s not like learning a language. It’s not like learning a framework like a JavaScript framework, a basic PHP framework, or anything like that. You don’t have to memorize the classes. You just need to know where to look in the documentation and what it is capable of. But I think it’s really important to learn HTML/CSS first to learn Bootstrap. You should be able to build a completely static website without bootstrap before moving on to learning Bootstrap or any CSS framework. I’m not saying you have to master it and learn animation and stuff like that. But I would say, learn all the basics like colours and backgrounds and other stuff. The box model is very important to understand. Padding, margin, border, stuff like that, and also positioning. So, I would suggest learning flexbox, and learning CSS grids, so you can line things up properly without having to use a frame. Once you master these basics and create a few frameless websites yourself, learn Bootstrap.

Let’s say you’re a Django developer or a Ruby on Rails or Laravel developer, you can focus on your entire backend and then use Bootstrap to easily prototype your frontend, even if you plan to use something else later. At least it looks decent as far as the website is concerned, as far as the front-end is concerned. Then I would highly recommend customizing it because you don’t want it to look like any other bootstrap site and to do that you need to learn how to configure it, download the sources and install it with NPM. You can also use SAAS. This is another thing I would highly recommend learning, and it’s another thing that’s easy to learn. And when I say simple, I mean relating to learning a language or something. You can learn SAAS over a weekend. Is it so that by learning SAAS you can customize things so you don’t have to use the default. You can change your primary and secondary colours. You can include specific parts of Bootstrap so you don’t even have to include the whole thing. Just maps, buttons, and notifications. You can include just these 3 things instead of including the whole framework, which will save you on file size. In Bootstrap 5 you don’t even need jQuery anymore, so file size isn’t an issue anymore.

Another thing that comes with Bootstrap is JavaScript widgets. So not everyone who builds websites knows how to create a hamburger menu or modal. This gives you an easy way to implement this in your projects. Before you get into JavaScript, you need to know how to deal with DOM and things like that. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about Bootstrap and other CSS frameworks over the years is that they all look the same, and that may be true if you don’t take the time to customize. Many of these sites may look alike and you can tell from a mile away that they use Bootstrap.

But if we look at some Bootstrap themes that are for sale. You can buy them, but I just wanted to take a look at some of them. They have dashboards that look a lot alike, but they look really good. If you’re building a CMS or an e-commerce backend, it looks pretty good. Many of them will look similar since this is the Bootstrap website. I remember a few years ago every website was different. They were all unique, but they were terrible. Crazy animations and marquee scrolling text and many of them looked horrible and you couldn’t even find what you wanted. Even though the pages aren’t quite as flashy these days, I appreciate that they’re easy to read and clean. Back to Bootstrap learning, I think it’s worth it if you can learn it quickly. You don’t have to memorize every class because you have the documentation there for reference. If you’ve installed the Bootstrap 5 JavaScript widget, you don’t even need jQuery. I would suggest learning it, but I’m not saying you should always use it. Of course, you need to learn HTML and CSS before jumping into a CSS framework. I think it’s really important, at least in my opinion.