Book Image

Modern Frontend Development with Node.js

By : Florian Rappl
5 (1)
Book Image

Modern Frontend Development with Node.js

5 (1)
By: Florian Rappl

Overview of this book

Almost a decade after the release of Node.js, the tooling used by frontend developers is fully embracing this cross-platform JavaScript runtime, which is sadly often limited to server-side web development. This is where this Node.js book comes in, showing you what this popular runtime has to offer and how you can unlock its full potential to create frontend-focused web apps. You’ll begin by learning the basics and internals of Node.js, before discovering how to divide your code into modules and packages. Next, you’ll get to grips with the most popular package managers and their uses and find out how to use TypeScript and other JavaScript variants with Node.js. Knowing which tool to use when is crucial, so this book helps you understand all the available state-of-the-art tools in Node.js. You’ll interact with linters such as ESLint and formatters such as Prettier. As you advance, you’ll become well-versed with the Swiss Army Knife for frontend developers – the bundler. You’ll also explore various testing utilities, such as Jest, for code quality verification. Finally, you’ll be able to publish your code in reusable packages with ease. By the end of this web development book, you’ll have gained the knowledge to confidently choose the right code structure for your repositories with all that you’ve learned about monorepos.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Node.js Fundamentals
5
Part 2: Tooling
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics

Understanding auxiliary tooling

When most people think about software, they’ll have applications such as Microsoft Word, games such as Minecraft, or web applications such as Facebook in mind. Thanks to popular media, the widespread opinion is that these applications are written by individual geniuses that hack some ones and zeroes into an obscure interface. The reality could not be more far off.

As you know, to create any kind of software, lots of libraries, tooling, and – in many cases – large teams are necessary. However, what most people underestimate is the effort to just keep the ball rolling – that is, to still be able to add new features to the existing software. There are several issues that contribute to this feature slowdown.

On the one hand, the complexity within software always rises. This is whether we want it or not – with every new feature, a project becomes more challenging. In addition, larger software tends to be written by...