Welcome to the series! In this episode, we're setting the stage for everything we're about to learn with Alpine JS. We'll talk about what Alpine is—a super lightweight JavaScript framework that helps you quickly add interactive features to your pages without getting bogged down in heavy code.

You'll get an idea of the journey ahead: we'll start with the basics, like installing Alpine, and then move through key features. We'll see how to show information, toggle things on and off conditionally, bind attributes dynamically (think changing CSS classes on the fly), loop over arrays, and handle events such as clicks.

Plus, to make everything stick, we’ll build some practical mini-projects along the way—a modal, a live-updating markdown parser, and even a live search feature that talks to the Hacker News API as you type. By the end, you'll have a toolkit that lets you bring Alpine into your own projects straight away.

Ready? Let's dive in and get Alpine set up in the next episode!