Book Image

Real-World Next.js

By : Michele Riva
Book Image

Real-World Next.js

By: Michele Riva

Overview of this book

Next.js is a scalable and high-performance React.js framework for modern web development and provides a large set of features, such as hybrid rendering, route prefetching, automatic image optimization, and internationalization, out of the box. If you are looking to create a blog, an e-commerce website, or a simple website, this book will show you how you can use the multipurpose Next.js framework to create an impressive user experience. Starting with the basics of Next.js, the book demonstrates how the framework can help you reach your development goals. You'll realize how versatile Next.js is as you build real-world applications with step-by-step explanations. This Next.js book will guide you in choosing the right rendering methodology for your website, securing it, and deploying it to different providers, all while focusing on performance and developer happiness. By the end of the book, you'll be able to design, build, and deploy modern architectures using Next.js with any headless CMS or data source.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Next.js
5
Part 2: Hands-On Next.js
14
Part 3: Next.js by Example

CSS modules

In the previous section, we saw a CSS-in-JS library, meaning that we had to write our CSS definitions in JavaScript, transforming those styling rules to plain CSS at runtime or compile time, depending on which library we choose and how we configure it.

While I personally like the CSS-in-JS approach, I eventually recognized that it has some significant drawbacks to consider when choosing the styling method for a new Next.js app.

Many CSS-in-JS libraries don't provide good IDE/code editor support, making things way harder for developers (no syntax highlighting, autocomplete, linting, and so on). Also, using CSS-in-JS forces you to adopt more and more dependencies, making your application bundle bigger and slower.

Talking about performance, here's another big drawback: even if we pre-generate CSS rules on the server side, we would need to re-generate them after React hydration on the client side. That adds a high runtime cost, making the web application...