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
🔗
v1.7.5
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
🔗
- 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
🔗
- 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 fromdevServer
configuration. Reading from source I learned thatwebpack-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 theApp
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
🔗
- 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
anddeleteNote
bind
s toconstructor
level. LogicallyLane
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
toNoteStore
. 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
hookgit 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.