Getting the most out of this book
The content in this book is practical-oriented and covers the implementation steps, code, and concepts relevant to building out each MERN application. It is recommended that, rather than attempting to just read through the chapters, you should run the relevant code in parallel, and browse through the application features while following the explanations in the book.
Chapters that discuss code implementations will point to GitHub repositories containing the complete code with instructions on how to run the code. You can pull the code, install, and run it before reading through the chapter:
You may consider the recommended following steps outlined to follow the implementations in this book:
- Before ping into the implementation details discussed in the chapter, pull code from the relevant GitHub repository
- Follow instructions with the code to install and run the application
- Browse the features of the running application, while reading the feature descriptions in the relevant chapter
- With the code running in development mode and also open in the editor, refer to the steps and explanations in the book to get a deeper understanding of the implementations
This book aims to provide a quick onboarding with working code for each application. You can experiment with, improve, and extend this code as desired. For an active learning experience, you are encouraged to refactor and modify the code while following the book. In some examples, the book chooses verbose code over succinct and cleaner code because it is easier to reason about for newcomers. In some other implementations, the book sticks with more widely used and traditional conventions over modern and upcoming JavaScript conventions. This is done to minimize disparity when you refer to online resources and documentation while researching the discussed technologies and concepts on your own. These instances where the code in the book can be updated, serve as good opportunities to explore and grow skills beyond what is covered in the book.