Synopses & Reviews
Traditionally, web applications have been architected so that the back-end houses all the front-end code. This has resulted in heavy projects that are difficult to manage and scale. This book will explain a new way to write web applications by treating the front-end as if it were a third-party (such as a mobile client). This book, written by a practicing MEAN developer, will take a holistic approach to using the MEAN JavaScript platform for creating modern web applications and lay out how to use the MEAN (Mongo, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js) set of tools to create a web application, from installation and setup of the tools to debugging and deploying your app. After an introduction to how web development is changing and the advantages of using the MEAN stack, the author jumps into an introduction to each tool and then dives into using the complete JavaScript-based application stack to build, test, and deploy apps.
About the Author
Jeff Dickey is a full stack web developer with extensive startup experience in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Jeff has started projects, maintained large enterprise systems, and lead development teams. He brings a developer's perspective and enjoys pragmatism and action while avoiding red tape.
Education is the most important quality in Jeff's life, both and a teacher and a student. He surrounds himself with those smarter than myself to learn as much as possible. His experience teaching has greatly helped his communication skills with less technical people and is incredibly rewarding as well.
Outside of work, Jeff is a teacher at General Assembly Los Angeles and Lead Organizer for the LA Code for America brigade. Through teaching and civic hacking, he hopes to help others solve problems both in business and civic hacking.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents:
MEAN Stack
• Introduction
o Audience
o Book techniques
• How architecture is changing
o Problems with traditional 3-tier web applications
o MEAN stack advantages
o Moving away from 3-tier applications
o Multiple databases for different use-cases
o Mobile clients mean everything needs an API
o High-level advantages of MEAN stack
o Companies using similar stacks
o Why JavaScript/JSON works well for web applications
o Not fast
o Web is heavy IO
o How JS callbacks solve IO bottleneck problems
• Introduction to each tool
o AngularJS
o Node.js/Express
o MongoDB
• Todo list project
o Build app in angular without persistence
o Using curl and “error-driven development” to build static Node.js app
o Connect node app to Mongo
o Build Angular service to connect to Node
o Allow two users at the same time via websockets
o Authentication
• Ideas
o Redis: often used with this sort of stack
o Deploying: digitalocean
o Testing
o Security