The Road to React with Firebase is your personal journey to master advanced React for business web applications in JavaScript whereas Firebase is used to replace everything that you would want from a backend application. Firebase enables you to connect your React application to a database, to authenticated users with your application with a login, logout and register mechanisms, and to authorize only certain users to access your application. It also comes with hosting capabilities and with social logins via Google, Facebook and more. Everything will be explained in the book while building a business web application yourself.
I wrote the The Road to React with Firebase over the last two years. During this time, I came to understand the practical genius of Firebase, and how it dramatically reduces the tech stack to focus on getting sh*t done. Once you have set up your starter kit project -- that's what we are going to do together in this book -- you are ready to iterate fast on your personal ideas. There is no need to complicate things by adding a backend application with a database to your frontend application, because Firebase takes care of it with a well-designed API. I applied the same principles as my other books:
- Stay pragmatic
- Keep it simple
- Answer the why, not just the how
- Experience a problem, solve a problem
This book is not intended to be an end-all reference for the Firebase API nor an in-depth guide about the internals of Firebase. Instead, its purpose is to journey through learning Firebase with React the pragmatic way, building an entire application on this tech stack yourself. The end result is the foundation to make your business application a reality.
Requirements
To get the most out of this book, you should be familiar with the basics of web development, which includes knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You will also need to be familiar with the term API, because APIs are used frequently for the applications in this book.
Editor/Terminal or IDE
For the development environment, use a running editor/terminal (command line tool) or IDE with integrated terminal. I will provide a setup guide if you're unsure about which tools to use. The guide is set up for MacOS users, but you can find a Windows setup guide there as well.
Node and NPM
You will need to have node and npm installed, which are used to run the applications we'll build and manage the libraries we'll use along the way. In this book, you will install external node packages via npm (node package manager). These node packages can be libraries or whole frameworks. You can verify which node and npm versions you have in the command line:
- node --version
- v10.11.0
- npm --version
- v6.5.0
These are the versions used for this publication. If you don't see output in your terminal, you will need to install node and npm.
React
My other book, called The Road to learn React, teaches the fundamentals about React by building a real world application. It is available for free, and after having read it, you should possess all the understanding necessary to work with the application(s) from this book. Also there will be many sidenotes to React articles that may be helpful.