Chapter 1, Getting Started with Isomorphic Web Apps, describes what isomorphic apps are and how they differ from the conventional SPAs that are around. They will understand the main challenges that developers might face while building isomorphic apps. Once the intro is done, they will get their hands dirty by setting up the development environment in order to start creating their isomorphic application.

Chapter 2, Creating a Web UI with React, describes how to start with building a web UI by using idiomatic JavaScript and React. They will begin creating components for the application and will learn how to organize the flow of data between the components for effective development.

Chapter 3, Working with CSS and Media Assets, describes how to style their UI components and bundle CSS and graphics into them. They will learn to effectively configure Webpack to bundle their assets.

Chapter 4, Working with Browsersync and Hot Module Replacement, describes how you can configure server-side rendering for your app, effectively optimizing your website for search engines (SEO) and improving the initial page load time.

Chapter 5, Creating a GraphQL Server, describes how to implement a GrapgQL server, based on Node, Express, and SQL. They will understand how it works in relation to the traditional RESTful API structure. They will learn to receive, validate, and modify data on the server.

Chapter 6, Fetching Data with Relay, explains how to effectively use Relay to query and fetch application data, and how to make it work with the application router.

Chapter 7, Implementing Routing and Navigation, describes how you can implement routing and navigation from scratch, and also how to integrate an existing library to fit into your isomorphic web app.

Chapter 8, Authentication and Authorization, gets into the intricacies of securing the application. Readers will learn how to implement a token-based authentication and access control for an isomorphic application.

Chapter 9, Testing and Deploying Your App, explains how to configure unit and integration tests. It also contains a few recipes on how to deploy your app to a cloud hosting service.

You need any OS with Node 6+ installed and NPM 4+.

This book is for developers who want to improve their JavaScript application skills and build a unified JavaScript application.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, and user input are shown as follows: "Note that the majority of the preceding modules should be installed as dev dependencies, by using the --save-dev command-line argument."

A block of code is set as follows:

<script src="moment.js"></script> 
<script> 
  moment().format('MMMM Do YYYY, h:mm:ss a'); 
</script>  

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

$ npm install babel-core, bluebird, express \              moment, react, react-dom --save

New terms and important words are shown in bold, for example, appear in the text like this: "Module bundlers such as Browserify or Webpack allow you to bundle and optimize JavaScript code for a specific environment."

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