Frank Zammetti - Modern Full-Stack Development: Using TypeScript, React, Node.js, Webpack, and Docker

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484257371 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

You know, when I started learning how to program, it was a piece of cake!

Youd turn on the computer and be greeted by a nice little Ready prompt. Youd start typing in some code (BASIC), and eventually, youd type run, hit Enter, and watch whatever it was you put in there spit back something (my first program was a man drawn with various keyboard characters doing jumping jacks). You might save that program to a cassette yes, kids, acassette! and hand it to your friends if you wanted to share.

But that was it. It was just that easy.

Nowadays, though, the story isverydifferent.

Writing even a trivial application now involves layers upon layers of abstractions and complexities that you must mix together, like baking the worlds most complicated cake, hoping it all works in the end. Then, should you want to distribute the technological terror youve constructed (sorry, Aldearan), youve got even more challenges to overcome.

Howanyonelearns to program from scratch these days, Im not sure!

But Im hoping to help there!

With this book, Im going to look at the ingredients that go into baking a cake err, building an application these days. To be sure, it wont cover everything. And no one recipe is necessarily the same anyway there are lots of choices available to a developer now. But I believe Ive chosen the ones most commonly used to build modern full-stack applications.

What exactly is a full-stack application anyway? Well, simply put, its an application that includes both a front-end client, like a web site, and a back-end server, like, well, aserver! Were talking about building an application that combines those two halves into a coherent whole. Most application development these days is web-based in some way (where web doesnt have to mean something available on the public Internet, but something built with web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS), so thats what were going to be doing in this book.

To do this, were going to use React, which is one of the most popular libraries for building clients out there today. And well use Node.js, which is a popular choice for back-end development. Were also going to use TypeScript, a language that enhances JavaScript on both sides of the fence to make our coding lives better. Were going to touch on several other tools that relate to all of this including Babel and Webpack. Well talk about some strategies for connecting the client to the server including REST and WebSockets. Finally, youll learn about packaging up applications using the very popular Docker.

All this will be combined to build two full, real applications. This way, its not just simple, contrived examples. No, itll be real code, practical solutions to real problems encountered in building them, and real techniques for putting all these pieces together and making sense of all this complexity.

In the end, youll have a solid foundation for building modern full-stack applications that you can go forward with on your own to create greatness.

I mean itll never be as great as my guy doing jumping jacks written in BASIC and loaded off a cassette, but you gotta have goals.

So lets get to it. Theres work to be done, learning to be accomplished, and, I hope, fun to be had!

Id like to acknowledge the exceptional team at Apress for allowing me to write not one but twelve books for them over the last decade or so. Ive worked with so many great people, and its virtually impossible not to forget someone in a list like this, but among the crew for sure are Ami Knox, Arockia Rajan Dhurai, Beth Christmas, Dulcy Nirmala Chellappa, Chris Mills, Christine Ricketts, Dominic Shakeshaft, Douglas Pundick, Frank Parnell, Frank Pohlmann, Gary Cornell, Jill Balzano, Julie Miller, Katie Stence, Kelly Gunther, Kelly Winquist, Kevin Shea, Kim Wimpsett, Kimberly van der Elst, Krishnan Sathyamurthy, Laura Cheu, Laura Esterman, Leah Weissburg, Leonard Cuellar, Liz Welch, Louise Corrigan, Marilyn Smith, Michelle Lowman, Nancy Chen, Nicole Faraclas, Nirmal Selvaraj, Richard Dal Porto, Sharon Wilkey, Sofia Marchant, Stephanie Parker, Steve Anglin, Tina Nielsen, and Tracy Brown Collins.

As I said, Im sure Ive forgotten someone, but rest assured it was not on purpose! Thank you all for giving me a shot and allowing me to continue this journey. I most definitely could not have done it alone and I thank you all, unreservedly!