Approaching our project

I firmly believe that the best motivation for learning new technology is a project that excites you and that you can't wait to build. As an experienced developer, you've probably already built a number of successful commercial projects that share certain product features, design patterns, and even target audiences. In this book, I want you to build a project that feels like a breath of fresh air. A project which you most likely wouldn't build in your day-to-day work. It has to be a fun endeavor, which not only educates you but also satisfies your curiosity and stretches your imagination. Yet, guessing that you're a busy professional, this project shouldn't be a time consuming, long-term commitment for you either.

Enter Snapterest—a web application that allows you to discover and collect public photos posted on Twitter. Think of it as Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) with the only source of pictures being Twitter. We will implement a fully functional website with the following core functionalities:

When you start working on a new project, the very first thing that you do is you get your tools ready. For this project, we will be using a number of tools that you might not be familiar with, so let's discuss what they are, and how you can install and configure them.

If you have any trouble with installing and configuring the tools and modules from this chapter, then go to https://github.com/fedosejev/react-essentials and create a new issue; describe what you're doing and what error message you're getting. I will do my best to help you resolve your issue.

In this book, I'll assume that you're working on a Macintosh or Windows computer. If you're a Unix user, then most likely you will know your package manager very well, and it should be easy enough for you to install the tools that you will learn about in this chapter.

Let's start with the installation of Node.js.