Getting started with Astro (Book)

Getting started with Astro teaches you everything you need to know about how to build sites and apps with Astro.

Who am I

Hi, my name is Robert Guss, and I have been working as a full-time senior software engineer for over 8+ years. I have taught over 44,000 students on Udemy and countless others via my site HowtoCode.io. I am also the creator of the theme Creek, one of Astro's most popular blog themes.

Book Formats

The book comes in multiple formats: pdf, epub, mobi, HTML & Notion.

Sample chapter

You can view a sample chapter here.

What you will learn

1. What makes Astro different from other frameworks
2. Astro’s Island Architecture
3. Astro components, pages, and layouts
4. Static routes & dynamic routes
5. How to work with remote data from both REST APIs and GraphQL APIs
6. How to work with both markdown and MDX files

What will you build

• This book has two projects.
• In the first project, we will build a blog together as this is the best way, in my opinion, to learn all of Astro’s features.
• We will first create our blog using markdown files
• Then we will convert our markdown files to MDX
• Then we will Install and setup Strapi CMS to use as our headless CMS
• We will then learn how to fetch our blog posts from Strapi and render them in our Astro pages and components from a REST API
  • We will also learn how to generate dynamic routes from the Strapi REST API
• Then we will learn how to use Strapi as a GraphQL API and render our posts in Astro using GraphQL
• In the 2nd project, you will learn how to download a pre-built Astro theme and modify it to render your blog posts from Strapi CMS (REST API and GraphQL API).

Table of Contents

• Astro Islands & what makes Astro different
• Development setup & tools
• How to install Astro and create your first site
• Astro components
• Layouts & pages
• Static routes
• Dynamic routes
• Fetching remote data from APIs
• Markdown & MDX
• How to integrate UI frameworks, themes & tools
• Content collections

• Creating our markdown blog
• Updating our blog posts to use MDX
• Installing & setting up Strapi CMS
• Rendering the blog posts from Strapi
• Creating dynamic routes for each post
• Using GraphQL in Strapi & Astro

GitHub repo & code included

All the code used in the book is included.

Updates

This book is regularly updated as the Astro team makes improvements and adds new features to the framework.