Quick Start Full Stack Web Development removes the trial and error from learning to make web applications. Being a full stack web developer does not mean knowing everything about every web technology,but rather knowing enough to build a complete application including a front end, a back end, and a database. Web searching can provide useful snippets of information, but integrating those pieces into a working whole remains a challenge. This book will walk the reader through both the component technologies and the steps required to get the pieces to work together. This clear focus can save countless hours of frustration compared to trying to assemble a working solution from inconsistent and outdated sources.
The reader should have some familiarity with Python or JavaScript, but no web programming experience is assumed. Quick Start Full Stack Web Development explains key concepts, such as REST APIs and JSON Web Tokens, and then puts these concepts into practice with real, working examples. The examples are built step-by-step, providing an opportunity to experiment with the ideas. Furthermore, there is a consistent focus on getting instant feedback as changes are made to the code, a good practice for quickly building intuition and gaining experience.
The chosen technologies (React, Flask, and PostgreSQL) are excellent options for newcomers to web development because they are relatively easy to learn, have vibrant supportive communities, and can scale to large and complex applications. Rather than providing a cursory introduction to a variety of technology options, Quick Start Full Stack Web Development provides a thorough foundation in one technology stack. This prevents confusion, provides more opportunities to reinforce concepts, and leads more quickly to significant results.
Learn how to:
- Build a Python Flask REST API
- Develop and style a React client
- Design SQLite and PostgreSQL databases using SQLAlchemy
- Incorporate JSON Web Tokens (JWT) for authentication
- Test it using httpie, browser dev tools, pytest, and Jest
- Document it using Sphinx and Storybook
- Deploy using Gunicorn and NGINX on a Platform-as-a-Service
The result is a fully functional full stack web application that addresses all the little details, like serving the client and API from the same server, managing the environment with a config file, making the documentation visible in the git repository, and populating and uploading databases.
Because it focuses on getting to a working application, Quick Start Full Stack Web Development is well suited to entrepreneurs and solopreneurs building out their minimal viable products. And because it explains the concepts and shows them in practice, it will help programmers who want to get into web development. If you want to learn these powerful skills as quickly as possible, then this book is for you.
