Preface

Hi there – I am Daniel, an entrepreneur, technical advisor, and full-stack developer with a focus on technologies in the React ecosystem.

In my time as a technical advisor and developer for enterprises and the public sector, I have noticed that more and more companies look to reduce the gap between frontend and backend developers. Their business requirements often result in the need for a so-called “backend for frontend,” where data is fetched from different backend systems and prepared in a way that can be easily displayed in the frontend.

As an entrepreneur, I also have experience with starting new projects with smaller teams, where it is essential that every developer on your team can do everything, not just the frontend or the backend. In such cases, it often makes sense to develop the backend and frontend in the same language, which is often JavaScript (or TypeScript), because there is a big ecosystem and a large number of developers available.

In both cases, becoming a full-stack developer is getting increasingly more important. I have been coaching developers to learn more about full-stack development for a long time and have noticed that there are common issues and misunderstandings that most developers encounter when learning full-stack development. In this book, I want to summarize all my learnings and teachings about full-stack development, giving you pointers on where and how to learn more about the ever-growing ecosystem of full-stack development in JavaScript.

Nowadays, many companies use a stack consisting of MongoDB, Express, React, and Node.js, called the MERN stack. In this book, I will teach you how to build modern full-stack React applications by using these technologies. I will teach these technologies from the ground up, using as few libraries as possible, so that you can learn the essential concepts. This will allow you to adapt to new technologies for years to come, even when the specific tools used in this book become outdated. Additionally, I will teach about the deployment of apps and DevOps, as I found that this sector is often neglected and there are not enough developers who know about it. In the last part of the book, I will introduce Next.js as a full-stack framework and give an outlook on new developments in this sector, such as React Server Components and Server Actions.

I hope you enjoy reading this book. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to me!