Preface

Create React App is, in my mind, the ultimate example of a proper bootstrapping tool. Instead of the multiple hours of tedium getting everything tweaked and configured to be just right and hoping that you haven't missed anything along the way, you are instead given a tool and a project that is built and ready to go from the first minute you want to start embarking on your project. Now, the start up time to get moving on a project that is fully-featured goes from hours, or maybe even days, to minutes, and nothing is stopping you from building the React project of your dreams!

This book is intended for those that want to get intimately familiar with the Create React App tool. We'll cover all of the commands, all of the new additions in version 2, and we'll cover actually building a project from scratch and touching on all of the key concepts along the way to make sure you're able to take advantage of this tool to the absolute fullest!

Who this book is for

This book is designed for anyone with some JavaScript knowledge who is looking to take better advantage of the Create React App bootstrap tool to get started building their own amazing React projects. If you're looking to get better at JavaScript and building projects with best practices in mind, this book will also be for you! Even if you're a React veteran who has just never or rarely used Create React App to get started with their projects, this book will still give you plenty to learn from and work with!

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introducing Create React App 2, gets you started with Create React App and helps you to understand the prerequisites and commands you'll need in order to get moving!

Chapter 2, Creating Our First Create React App Application, establishes the foundations of the project that we'll use for the remainder of the book. This will cover the basics of setting up a Create React App project.

Chapter 3, Create React App and Babel, explains the latest changes that Babel supports and how to write superior modern JavaScript using the latest features.

Chapter 4, Keep Your App Healthy with Tests and Jest, delves into how to maintain a healthy software development life cycle by covering testing in detail.

Chapter 5, Applying Modern CSS to Create React App Projects, is where we'll learn modern techniques to make our projects look beautiful and keep our style sheets organized in a sane way.

Chapter 6, Simulate Your Backend with a Proxy API, experiments with building a pseudo backend to our project and introduces techniques for pulling live data from servers using Fetch.

Chapter 7, Building Progressive Web Applications, experiments with using service workers built into Create React App 2 in order to build a progressive web application.

Chapter 8, Getting Your App Ready for Production, is where we'll finish putting the application together, making it production ready, and creating a build that can be deployed to a production environment.

To get the most out of this book

You'll need to have some experience of setting up Node.js on your computer and of programming, and you'll also require a compatible code editor, preferably one that will show you the directory structure of your projects.

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Download the color images

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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: "At the very top of the App.js file, we're going to add our import statement."

A block of code is set as follows:

const App = () => {
  return <div className="App">Homepage!</div>;
};

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

$ yarn add bootstrap@4 reactstrap@6.5.0

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. 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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