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

Summary

In this chapter, you learned what a bundler is, why you need it, what bundlers exist, and how you can configure and use them. You are now able to take your web projects from their raw source code to build production-ready assets.

Equipped with detailed knowledge about bundlers, you can create very reliable code bases that are tailored toward efficiency. Not only will unnecessary code be removed upon bundling, but also all referenced files will be processed and taken into consideration. Therefore, you’ll never have to worry about missing a file.

The large variety of existing bundlers can be intimidating at first. While there are some obvious choices, such as the very popular Webpack bundler, other options may be even better due to less complexity or better performance, depending on the project you have at hand. If in doubt, you can refer to the Comparing available bundlers section of this chapter to ascertain which bundler might be the best fit for you.

In the...