Preface

FastAPI is a Python-based asynchronous web framework for building fast and performant APIs (REST or GraphQL) that has seen great growth in popularity over the last couple of years. It enables developers to create flexible and powerful standards-compliant APIs as it is based on Python type hinting, it provides automatic documentation out of the box, and its performance is comparable to APIs developed in Go or Node.js.

React is arguably still the most popular solution for building user interfaces on the web. It is a library that adopts a declarative approach and simplifies the workflow by allowing developers to use only JavaScript or JSX, without a templating engine. With frameworks such as Next.js and a Node.js server, React enables us to create server-side generated or statically created web pages, while it is relatively easy to reuse an existing code base in React Native (for native applications), and with the plethora of third-party libraries, one of the strongest online communities, and the introduction of the Hooks mechanism, it has you covered whatever your specific need might be.

MongoDB is the most popular NoSQL database solution and offers numerous benefits – it is flexible and schemaless, it’s ideal for rapid prototyping, and it is also highly scalable and fast.

Combined together, these technologies blend very well, and though they bear a funny acronym (the FARM stack), they allow for a pleasant and fast developer experience, offer speed and flexibility, but most importantly, the opportunity to peruse the wide Python ecosystem, which is suitable for the most diverse problems – from data science and machine learning to analytics and image processing, task automation, and more.

This book aims to teach you how to design, build and deploy fast, scalable, standards-compliant, and flexible full-stack applications in an efficient and, hopefully, fun way. By the end of this book, you should be comfortable modeling the most diverse business problems with fluid requirements through a set of modern technologies and online services.