Chapter 1: Preparing Your Development Environment
The application we are going to build in this book will be a simplified version of Facebook, called Graphbook. We will allow our users to sign up and log in to read and write posts and chat with friends, similar to what we can do on common social networks.
When developing an application, being well-prepared is always a requirement. However, before we start, we need to put our stack together. In this chapter, we will explore whether our techniques work well with our development process, what we need before getting started, and which tools can help us when building software.
This chapter explains the architecture for our application by going through the core concepts, the complete process, and preparing for a working React setup.
This chapter covers the following topics:
- Architecture and technology
- Thinking critically about how to architect a stack
- Building the React and GraphQL stack
- Installing and configuring Node.js
- Setting up a React development environment with webpack, Babel, and other requirements
- Debugging React applications using Chrome DevTools and React Developer Tools
