The Road to React with Firebase: Your journey to master advanced React for business web applications

by Robin Wieruch

The Road to React with Firebase is your personal journey to master advanced React for business web applications in JavaScript whereas Firebase is used to replace everything that you would want from a backend application. Firebase enables you to connect your React application to a database, to authenticated users with your application with a login, logout and register mechanisms, and to authorize only certain users to access your application. It also comes with hosting capabilities and with social logins via Google, Facebook and more. Everything will be explained in the book while building a business web application yourself.

I wrote the The Road to React with Firebase over the last two years. During this time, I came to understand the practical genius of Firebase, and how it dramatically reduces the tech stack to focus on getting sh*t done. Once you have set up your starter kit project -- that's what we are going to do together in this book -- you are ready to iterate fast on your personal ideas. There is no need to complicate things by adding a backend application with a database to your frontend application, because Firebase takes care of it with a well-designed API. I applied the same principles as my other books:

Stay pragmatic
Keep it simple
Answer the why, not just the how
Experience a problem, solve a problem

This book is not intended to be an end-all reference for the Firebase API nor an in-depth guide about the internals of Firebase. Instead, its purpose is to journey through learning Firebase with React the pragmatic way, building an entire application on this tech stack yourself. The end result is the foundation to make your business application a reality.

Requirements

To get the most out of this book, you should be familiar with the basics of web development, which includes knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You will also need to be familiar with the term API, because APIs are used frequently for the applications in this book.

Editor/Terminal or IDE

For the development environment, use a running editor/terminal (command line tool) or IDE with integrated terminal. I will provide a setup guide if you're unsure about which tools to use. The guide is set up for MacOS users, but you can find a Windows setup guide there as well.

Node and NPM

You will need to have node and npm installed, which are used to run the applications we'll build and manage the libraries we'll use along the way. In this book, you will install external node packages via npm (node package manager). These node packages can be libraries or whole frameworks. You can verify which node and npm versions you have in the command line:

node --version
v10.11.0
npm --version
v6.5.0

These are the versions used for this publication. If you don't see output in your terminal, you will need to install node and npm.

React

My other book, called The Road to learn React, teaches the fundamentals about React by building a real world application. It is available for free, and after having read it, you should possess all the understanding necessary to work with the application(s) from this book. Also there will be many sidenotes to React articles that may be helpful.

201 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 23, 2019

About the author

Robin Wieruch is a german software engineer and freelancer located in Berlin. In the recent years he has gained experiences in single page applications which use Ember, Angular and React. He is a full-time JavaScript developer, is doing his best to teach students on his blog and strives to learn something new every day himself.

Reviews

[Obed M. Parlapiano · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really good book. Not as good as The Road To Learn React, but good none-the-less.

I like that it takes a more complex approach to app building, taking on a bigger challenge and assuming people know more things, not so much for beginners anymore.

I practically learned React with Wieruch's The Road To Learn React, and I took this one as a way to learn firebase. In truth, this is more about learning some of the basics of React, such as HoCs, Context, etc, which I already knew, so it wasn't so impactful for me.

I wish the book had less repeated code though. Social logins were a lot of pages with basically the same content.

Would recommend to anyone that has never added authentication to a React app, and wants to learn to build more complex, clientside-only React apps.

[Rinalds Domanovs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well this book was really gold for me. The way how Robin Wieruch everything shows, explains and implement step by step is really amazing and easy to follow. For me Robin Wieruch is the greatest teacher currently, because of all the topics he reviews and also provides with coding exercises to work on. I'm really satisfied with this book and as well with other books by Robin.

A BIG Thank you! Wishing you to continue in such a great way and provide amazing content to developer world!

[Joao Antunes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the third book I read from Robin.

Robin writes in a very clear way and use a lot of good examples to explain the topics he is talking about.

When I started reading this book I already had a good experience with Firebase. However I decided to read it anyways because I always learn something new with Robin, such as new react techniques and good practices in software development.

I am an avid follower of Robin's blog and I highly recommend you to be as well.

Thanks Robin for helping the dev community.

[Daniel Barenboim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very easy to follow along book on learning Firebase using React.
It's been hard to find any other good resources on this particular subject matter.

The only thing that could make this book better would be if it demonstrated more complex data nesting. I believe that would truly complete the lesson.
(Perhaps with multiple users having contacts and messages lists.)

Overall, a great book!
Thank you Robin :)