Preface

This book explores the development of full-stack JavaScript web applications by combining the power of React with industry-tested server-side technologies, such as Node.js, Express, and MongoDB. The JavaScript landscape has been growing rapidly for some time now. With an abundance of options and resources available in relation to full-stack JavaScript web applications, it is easy to get lost when you need to choose from these frequently changing entities, learn about them, and make them work together to build your own web applications. In an attempt to address this pain point, this book adopts a practical approach to help you set up and build a diverse range of working applications using the popular MERN stack.

Who this book is for

This book is for JavaScript developers who may have worked with React but have minimal experience with full-stack development involving Node.js, Express, and MongoDB.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Unleashing React Applications with MERN, introduces the MERN stack technologies and the applications that will be developed in this book. We will discuss developing web applications with React, Node.js, Express, and MongoDB.

Chapter 2, Preparing the Development Environment, helps you to set up the MERN stack technologies for development. We will explore essential development tools; install Node.js, MongoDB, Express, React, and any other required libraries; and then run code to check the setup.

Chapter 3, Building a Backend with MongoDB, Express, and Node, implements the backend of a skeleton MERN application. We will build a standalone server-side application with MongoDB, Express, and Node.js that stores user details and has APIs for user authentication and CRUD operations.

Chapter 4, Adding a React Frontend to Complete MERN, completes the MERN skeleton application by integrating a React frontend. We will implement a working frontend with React views for interacting with the user CRUD operations and auth APIs on the server.

Chapter 5, Growing the Skeleton into a Social Media Application, builds a social media application by extending the skeleton application. We will explore the capabilities of the MERN stack by implementing social media features, such as post sharing, liking, commenting, following friends, and an aggregated newsfeed.

Chapter 6, Building a Web-Based Classroom Application, focuses on building a simple online classroom application by extending the MERN stack skeleton application. This classroom application will support multiple user roles, the addition of course content and lessons, student enrollments, progress tracking, and course enrollment statistics.

Chapter 7, Exercising MERN Skills with an Online Marketplace, utilizes the MERN stack technologies to develop basic features in an online marketplace application. We will implement buying-and selling-related features with support for seller accounts, product listings, and product search by category.

Chapter 8, Extending the Marketplace for Orders and Payments, focuses on extending the online marketplace we built in the previous chapter by implementing capabilities for buyers to add products to a shopping cart, checkout, and place orders, and for sellers to manage these orders and have payments processed from the marketplace application. We will also integrate Stripe to collect and process payments.

Chapter 9, Adding Real-Time Bidding Capabilities to the Marketplace, focuses on teaching you how to use the MERN stack technologies, along with Socket.IO, to easily integrate real-time behavior in a full-stack application. We will do this by incorporating an auctioning feature with real-time bidding capabilities in the MERN marketplace application.

Chapter 10, Integrating Data Visualization with an Expense Tracking Application, focuses on using MERN stack technologies along with Victory—a charting library for React—to easily integrate data visualization features in a full-stack application. We will extend the MERN skeleton application to build an expense tracking application that will incorporate data processing and visualization features for expense data recorded by a user over time.

Chapter 11, Building a Media Streaming Application, focuses on extending the MERN skeleton application to build a media uploading and streaming application using MongoDB GridFS. We will start by building a basic media streaming application, allowing registered users to upload video files that will be stored on MongoDB and streamed back so that viewers can play each video in a simple React media player.

Chapter 12, Customizing the Media Player and Improving SEO, upgrades the media viewing capabilities of our media application with a custom media player and autoplay media list. We will implement customized controls on the default React media player, add a playlist that can be autoplayed, and improve SEO for the media details by adding selective server-side rendering with data for just the media detail view.

Chapter 13, Developing a Web-Based VR Game, uses React 360 to develop a three-dimensional virtual reality (VR)-infused game for the web. We will explore the three-dimensional and VR capabilities of React 360 and build a simple web-based VR game.

Chapter 14, Making the VR Game Dynamic Using MERN, is where you will build a dynamic VR game application by extending the MERN skeleton application and integrating React 360. We will implement a game data model that allows users to create their own VR games and incorporate the dynamic game data with the game developed using React 360.

Chapter 15, Following Best Practices and Developing MERN Further, reflects on the lessons learned in previous chapters and suggests improvements for further MERN-based application development. We will expand on some of the best practices already applied, such as modularity in the app structure, other practices that should be applied, such as writing test code, and possible improvements, such as optimizing bundle size.

To get the most out of this book

This book assumes that you have familiarity with basic web-based technologies, working knowledge of programming constructs in JavaScript, and a general idea of how React applications work. As you go through the book, you will uncover how these concepts come together when building fully-fledged web applications with React 16.13.1, Node.js 13.12.0, Express 4.17.1, and MongoDB 4.2.5.

In order to maximize your learning experience while reading through the chapters, it is recommended that you run the associated application code in parallel, maintaining the specified package versions and using the relevant instructions provided in each chapter.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code via the GitHub repository (link available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

1. Log in or register at www.packt.com.
2. Select the Support tab.
3. Click on Code Downloads.
4. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

• WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
• Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
• 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Full-Stack-React-Projects-Second-Edition. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system."

A block of code is set as follows:

addItem(item, cb) {
    let cart = []
    if (typeof window !== "undefined") {
      if (localStorage.getItem('cart')) {
        cart = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem('cart'))
      }
      cart.push({
        product: item,
        quantity: 1,
        shop: item.shop._id
      })
      localStorage.setItem('cart', JSON.stringify(cart))
      cb()
    }
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<Grid container spacing={24}>
      <Grid item xs={6} sm={6}>
            <CartItems checkout={checkout}
                  setCheckout={showCheckout}/>
      </Grid>
 {checkout && 
      <Grid item xs={6} sm={6}>
        <Checkout/>
      </Grid>}
</Grid>

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

yarn add --dev @babel/preset-react 

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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