Chapter 3: Next.js Basics and Built-In Components
Next.js is not only about server-side rendering. It provides some incredibly useful built-in components and functions that we can use to create performant, dynamic, and modern websites.
In this chapter, we're going to take a look at some concepts at the core of Next.js, such as routing systems, client-side navigation, serving optimized images, handling metadata, and more. These notions will be very beneficial once we move on to building some real-world applications with this framework.
We will also take a closer look at the _app.js
and _document.js
pages, which will allow us to customize our web app behavior in several ways.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- How the routing system works, both on the client and server sides
- How to optimize navigation between pages
- How Next.js serves static assets
- How to optimize image serving via automatic image optimization and the new
Image
component...