Moving from React to Next.js
If you already have some experience with React, you'll find it incredibly easy to build your first Next.js website. Its philosophy is very close to React and provides a convention-over-configuration approach for most of its settings, so if you want to take advantage of a specific Next.js feature, you'll easily find the official way for doing it without any need for complex configurations. An example? In a single Next.js app, you can specify which pages shall be server-side rendered and which shall be statically generated at build time without the need to write any configuration files or anything like that. You just have to export a specific function from your page and let Next.js do its magic (we'll see that in Chapter 2, Exploring Different Rendering Strategies).
The most significant difference between React and Next.js is that while React is just a JavaScript library, Next.js is a framework for building rich and complete user experiences both on the client and server sides, adding tons of incredibly useful features. Every server-side rendered or statically generated page will run on Node.js, so you'll lose access to some browser-specific global objects, such as fetch, window, and document, as well as some HTML elements such as canvas. You will always need to keep that in mind when you're writing your Next.js pages, even if the framework provides its own way for dealing with components that must use such global variables and HTML elements, as we'll see in Chapter 2, Exploring Different Rendering Strategies.
On the other hand, there might be times when you want to use Node.js specific libraries or APIs, such as fs or child_process, and Next.js allows you to use them by running your server-side code on each request or at build time (depending on how you choose to render your pages) before sending the data to the client.
But even if you want to create a client-side rendered app, Next.js can be a great alternative to the well-known create-react-app. Next.js, in fact, can be used as a framework for writing progressive and offline-first web apps with ease, taking advantage of its incredible built-in components and optimizations. So let's get started with Next.js.