Building large scale web apps

by Addy Osmani, Hassan Djirdeh

"Building Large Scale Web Apps" is a toolkit to managing large-scale React applications.

React as a library allows you to start building user interfaces quickly and easily. But how do things scale as an application grows? How do you ensure that your codebase remains manageable, your performance metrics stay on point, and your team continues to work cohesively as the project evolves?

In this book, you'll uncover strategies that industry professionals use to build scalable, performant, and maintainable React applications, all without becoming overwhelmed by complexity.

Genres: Programming, Software, Technical

Kindle Edition

Published March 24, 2024

About the author

Addy Osmani is a Senior Staff Engineering Manager working on Google Chrome. He leads up teams focused on making the web fast and low-friction to build on for developers. Addy has authored a number of books and has spoken at conferences around the world.

Reviews

[Christian Marques · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a pretty nice book for developers beginning their journey in the web app development world - I think it probably works well as an introduction to a lot of essential topics to have a web app in production and be able to scale it up, but unfortunately, it doesn't really expand from the superficiality of touching most of these topics on a very trivial light. The structure is good, but some topics are skimmed very fast (like bundling or scalable architectures), while others have a weird amount of detail (like how to write a unit test, or how to create a React component), so I felt that in this way the book is kind of inconsistent. I enjoyed the references made to some software engineering must-read books and articles, and in general, the authors provide a lot of good references to dive deeper into topics, while not approaching any of them in depth in this book. I think it's a good book for beginners and for developers who want to have a sort of checklist of essential topics to think about when building a web app.

[Bruno Sanches · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved how this book gives a broad overview of most challenges you'll definitely encounter when working on a large scale React application, while also providing examples and guidelines on how to approach each of them.

I also liked how the writing is clear and flows easily.

And by broad I mean really broad, it starts with a discussion of what is complexity, then goes into modularity, systems design, the file structure of a codebase, data fetching solutions, state management, performance, testing, ui design systems, i18n, distributed systems, tooling, type safety, and more... the list is long and on point, all critical parts.

The big disappointment (and the reason why this is not 5-stars) for me is with the printed version. I got the physical book because reading on screens doesn't work for me (I tried eBooks, many times). Here's the issue: the book is full of links to deepen your study on particular topics, but you can't really click anything on a paper. And as far as I know, there's no website where these resources are available (at least for people who bought the printed version), so you need to buy the ebook separately to have the pdfs and be able to click the links in order to take the full advantage of this content. I would expect the printed version to automatically give access to the ebook as well, even if that meant $10 more, it'd be a better experience for people who prefer reading printed books.

That aside, this book is well worth. It'll give you a lot more clarity on the important topics to consider in a large scale web application, specially if you feel a little lost or overwhelmed in such a huge landscape of tools, competing frameworks, and discussions. Thank you Addy and Hassan.

[Pavel Surinin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not worth the money. I liked a lot of references to blog posts and articles. But his book is too general and too shallow. Feels like reading a documentation of different librarires. It gives you a broad view of a UI developemnt practicies. From a title adn book price I expect to have a deep dive into UI topics and challenges. At least some.

[Edvins Antonovs · Rating 2 out of 5]

As a long-time Addy follower, I read much of his content and was fairly excited to read this book. Yet, I was disappointed and felt like my time was wasted. It is only worth reading for junior developers to learn what they should expect from modern front-end engineering.

[Indrek V · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicely put together book. Covers a lot of topics and is easy to read and understand. I especially loved that the book had simple code examples to show how to do things that it described.

[Vijay Kumar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a helpful guide on how to build large-scale react applications. Anyone who wants to learn how to structure their React apps and their development, this book is a must.

[Tadeusz Miesiąc · Rating 2 out of 5]

Book provides overview of building scaling web apps.
- Too wide for little experienced developers
- Too shallow for experienced developers
Good to have "under hand" as a checklist