SurviveJS - Webpack and React - v1.7.5

Onwards we go. v1.7.5 can be characterized as a refinement release. I went through “React and Flux” and “From Notes to Kanban” with my editor (thanks Jesús!). As a result we should have something that’s a notch better together. I took some decompression time during this iteration and negotiated a lot towards a better future I hope.

Book Improvements - v1.7.5

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In total 116 commits went to v1.7.5. To make it easier to follow what happened and where, I’ve split up the changes below.

You can see GitHub for all changes↗.

General Fixes

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• I learned something curious about a and an (no, we don’t have these things in Finnish). It is important to remember to take in count what the words sound like.
• Use nicer formatting for npm i bits. Now -- shouldn’t get mangled.

Introduction

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• The introduction of the book has been expanded somewhat. There’s only one chance to make a first impression so might as well try to do a good one.

Webpack Compared

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• Added an expanded explanation for make.
• Added JSPM↗. You should watch Glen Maddern’s↗ awesome demo about it. It wouldn’t surprise me a lot if JSPM had a bright future.

Developing with Webpack

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• Highlighted the importance of a proper .gitignore. I’ve seen some people to neglect this so I felt it’s good to cover. It’s just one of those things that saves your nerves. :)
• Dropped colors: true setting from devServer configuration. Reading from source I learned that webpack-dev-server actually detects for terminal colors automatically. As a result this bit of configuration can be dropped.

Implementing a Basic Note Application

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• Pushed notes definition outside of the App component. This cleans up the implementation a little.
• Added screenshots to show what you should see after each visual step.
• Expanded the explanation of super(). Remember that it refers to the method of the parent class.
• Improved the visual outlook of the add button.
• Made sure note tasks get assigned display: inline-block; to force a minimum height to them even if there’s no content at all. This way they can be edited even then.

React and Flux

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• Clarified Gluing It All Together section a lot.
• Pushed Dispatching in Alt to the end. I’ve settled for a convention where the main content should be about getting ahead with the application whereas these sort of good to know things have been pushed to the end.
• Dropped redundant this.notes = this.notes || []; check. This won’t be needed so it can be safely dropped. The same goes for bootstrapped data in general. It just works.
• Clarified and expanded What Are Decorators? and added an example showing how to implement @log for logging how methods are called.
• Reworked Using AltContainer Instead of a Decorator for clarity.

From Notes to Kanban

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• Added screenshots to illustrate progress.
• Reworked Modeling Lane for clarity.
• Reworked Making Lanes Responsible of Notes for clarity.
• Push addNote and deleteNote binds to constructor level. Logically Lane id remains the same during its lifecycle so this seemed like a safe change to make.
• Highlighted important code changes using bullet points.
• Added a section known as On Namespacing Components. This is a small technique you may find handy. It allows you to model cleaner component APIs so it’s worth knowing.
• Added missing get to NoteStore. While at it I bummed a couple of lines of code from it. Now it’s as compact as it can get.

Implementing Drag and Drop

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• Reworked introduction.
• Reworked Preparing Notes to Be Sorted.
• Pushed ItemTypes to '../libs/item_types' as it’s not a component.

We will be doing more work on this chapter to make it clearer still.

Building Kanban

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• Added more context to the code examples to make them clearer.

Authoring Libraries

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• Made sure preversion hook git commit takes --allow-empty to allow empty distribution commits to be made.
• Dropped redundant version related tip as preversion hook does everything we need now.

Styling React

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• Expanded on CSS Modules and linked to gajus/react-css-modules↗ as that makes it more convenient to work with them in React.

What Next?

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I’ll continue going through the content with my editor while listening to your feedback. I’m particularly interested in highlighting updated lines↗ as that would make it easier to follow what lines of code changed during the tutorial. I believe resolving this could help to push the book quality a notch further.

Now that the content is getting solid this means I can spend more time on producing new content. I’ll be focusing on typing next. Also some other plans have been put to motion but more on those later.

Conclusion

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I think this was yet another good step towards a quality release at Amazon. Thanks for everyone involved! You make it worthwhile. :)

I hope you enjoy this release. As usual feedback↗ and pull requests are welcome.

Remember that you can support my work by purchasing the book at Leanpub↗. Every little bit counts and allows me to keep it up.