What this book covers

Chapter 1, Understanding the Architecture of React Applications, teaches you how to think about applications from an architectural point of view. It starts by covering the importance of good architecture and its benefits. Then, it covers some bad and good practices in React applications. Finally, we will cover the planning of a real React application, which we will be building throughout the book.

Chapter 2, Setup and Project Structure Overview, covers all the tools and setup for the application that we will be building. It will introduce us to tools such as Next.js, TypeScript, ESLint, Prettier, Husky, and Lint Staged. Finally, it will cover the feature-based project structure for the project, which improves the code base organization.

Chapter 3, Building and Documenting Components, introduces us to Chakra UI, a great component library that we will be using as building blocks for our UI. We will cover setting it up, and then we will build the components that we can reuse all over the application to make the UI of the application more consistent. Finally, we will learn about documenting those components with Storybook.

Chapter 4, Building and Configuring Pages, covers Next.js in more depth. First, we will cover the basics, such as Next.js routing and the rendering strategies it supports. Then, we will learn how to handle shared layouts. Finally, we will apply those techniques by building the pages for our application.

Chapter 5, Mocking the API, dives deep into mocking the API that can be used for development and testing. It starts by explaining why it is useful. Then, it introduces the MSW library, which allows mocking API endpoints in an elegant way. Finally, we will apply what we have learned by implementing the endpoints for our application.

Chapter 6, Integrating the API into the Application, teaches us how to communicate with the backend API. We will learn how to configure the API client and React Query and use that to build the API layer for our application. Then, we will apply what we have learned by implementing the API calls for our application.

Chapter 7, Implementing User Authentication and Global Notifications, starts by teaching you how to implement the authentication for your application. Then, it demonstrates how to handle the global state by implementing the notifications system for our application.

Chapter 8, Testing, teaches you how to approach testing a React application. It covers unit testing with Jest, integration testing with Jest and React Testing Library, and end-to-end testing with Cypress.

Chapter 8, Configuring CI/CD for Testing and Deployment, covers the basics of a GitHub Actions pipeline. Then, we will learn how to configure the pipeline for code checking and testing. Finally, we will configure it for deployment to Vercel.

Chapter 10, Going Beyond, touches on some uncovered topics. Since the application is at the MVP stage, there is room for improvement, and this chapter covers some of those improvements. We will also learn about some technical improvements that would help the application scale even further.