In this chapter, you learned about Gatsby, a tool for generating static websites based on React components. We started the chapter off with a discussion on why you might want to consider building static sites, and why React is a good fit for this job. Static sites lead to an overall better user experience because they don't utilize the same types of resources as regular React apps would.

Next, you built your first Gatsby website. You learned the basic layout of files that are created by Gatsby starter templates and how to link pages together. Then, you learned that Gatsby data is driven by a plugin architecture. Gatsby is able to support various data sources via plugins. You got started with local filesystem data. Next, you learned about transformer plugins. These types of Gatsby plugins enable specific types of data sources to be queried via GraphQL.

Lastly, you looked at a Hacker News example built using Gatsby. This exposed you to fetching remote API data as the data source and generating pages dynamically based on GraphQL query results.

In the next and final chapter, you'll learn about tooling to containerize and deploy your React applications alongside the services that they consume.