Book Image

Next.js Quick Start Guide

By : Kirill Konshin
Book Image

Next.js Quick Start Guide

By: Kirill Konshin

Overview of this book

Next.js is a powerful addition to the ever-growing and dynamic JavaScript world. Built on top of React, Webpack, and Babel, it is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript applications. This book will show you the best practices for building sites using Next. js, enabling you to build SEO-friendly and superfast websites. This book will guide you from building a simple single page app to a scalable and reliable client-server infrastructure. You will explore code sharing between client and server, universal modules, and server-side rendering. The book will take you through the core Next.js concepts that everyone is talking about – hot reloading, code splitting, routing, server rendering, transpilation, CSS isolation, and more. You will learn ways of implementing them in order to create your own universal JavaScript application. You will walk through the building and deployment stages of your applications with the JSON API,customizing the confguration, error handling,data fetching, deploying to production, and authentication.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Making Next.js routing

Now that we know how to make Next.js routing, let's make another page:

// pages/second.js
import React from "react";
export default () => (<div>Second</div>);

This new page is accessible via http://localhost:3000/second.

Now, let's add a link to that second page to the index page.

If we use a simple <a> tag for this, it will work, of course, but it will perform a regular server request instead of client-side navigation, so performance will be much worse: the client will reload all the initialization payloads, and will be forced to re-initialize the entire app.
  1. In order to do proper client-side navigation, we need to import a link component from Next.js:
      // pages/index.js
import React from "react";
import Link from "next/link";
export default () => (<div><Link href...