You know, when I started learning how to program, it was a piece of cake!

You’d turn on the computer and be greeted by a nice little “Ready” prompt. You’d start typing in some code (BASIC), and eventually, you’d type run, hit Enter, and watch whatever it was you put in there spit back something (my first program was a man drawn with various keyboard characters doing jumping jacks). You might save that program to a cassette – yes, kids, acassette ! – and hand it to your friends if you wanted to share.

But that was it. It was just that easy.

Nowadays, though, the story isvery different.

Writing even a trivial application now involves layers upon layers of abstractions and complexities that you must mix together, like baking the world’s most complicated cake, hoping it all works in the end. Then, should you want to distribute the technological terror you’ve constructed (sorry, Aldearan), you’ve got even more challenges to overcome.

Howanyone learns to program from scratch these days, I’m not sure!

But I’m hoping to help there!

With this book, I’m going to look at the ingredients that go into baking a cake – err, building an application – these days. To be sure, it won’t cover everything. And no one recipe is necessarily the same anyway – there are lots of choices available to a developer now. But I believe I’ve chosen the ones most commonly used to build modern full-stack applications.

What exactly is a full-stack application anyway? Well, simply put, it’s an application that includes both a front-end “client,” like a web site, and a back-end “server,” like, well, aserver ! We’re talking about building an application that combines those two halves into a coherent whole. Most application development these days is web-based in some way (where “web” doesn’t have to mean something available on the public Internet, but something built with web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS), so that’s what we’re going to be doing in this book.

To do this, we’re going to use React, which is one of the most popular libraries for building clients out there today. And we’ll use Node.js, which is a popular choice for back-end development. We’re also going to use TypeScript, a language that enhances JavaScript on both sides of the fence to make our coding lives better. We’re going to touch on several other tools that relate to all of this including Babel and Webpack. We’ll talk about some strategies for connecting the client to the server including REST and WebSockets. Finally, you’ll learn about packaging up applications using the very popular Docker.

All this will be combined to build two full, real applications. This way, it’s not just simple, contrived examples. No, it’ll be real code, practical solutions to real problems encountered in building them, and real techniques for putting all these pieces together and making sense of all this complexity.

In the end, you’ll have a solid foundation for building modern full-stack applications that you can go forward with on your own to create greatness.

I mean it’ll never be as great as my guy doing jumping jacks written in BASIC and loaded off a cassette, but you gotta have goals.

So let’s get to it. There’s work to be done, learning to be accomplished, and, I hope, fun to be had!