Fullstack GraphQL: Complete Guide to Building Servers and Clients in GraphQL

by Roy Derks, Gaetano Checinski, Nate Murray (Editor)

Fullstack GraphQL is the busy engineer's guide to building real-world GraphQL servers and clients with examples in Node.js, React, TypeScript, and Apollo. The structure of this book is loosely inspired by the workflow of a Fullstack Engineer and we reveal GraphQL-specific concepts through the life-cycle of a real-world app within the book's 10 chapters. In the first part of the book, we talk about GraphQL Clients in a variety of how to setup a “hello-world” application with Node, in the browser, and in a React app with Apollo. We then dive into building a bigger React app where we generate TypeScript types from our GraphQL queries. Then we talk about real-world performance issues, strategies for fetching data, and ways to make changes with mutations (that results in super-fast end-user performance). In the second part of the book, we talk about GraphQL Servers. GraphQL clients are an absolute joy to use – but only because the “pain” was dealt with by a backend engineer to build the server. GraphQL Servers are the hard part of GraphQL! But after reading these chapters you’ll make it look easy. We talk about a ton of details that aren’t usually covered together how to manage authentication to protect fields, how to deal with batching queries and use dataloader, how to connect TypeORM to auto-generate a GraphQL server, how to calculate query costs for performance considerations a ton more.

259 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 11, 2021

Reviews

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reviewing the version dated 2020-10-14.

This is a good book for those who are unfamiliar with GraphQL. As for me, I've been using GraphQL for some time now, and so nothing much is new for me, but even then, I picked up a thing or two, particularly related to TypeScript, which I don't use professionally. My only complaints are that some of the texts don't match the accompanying code, the organization of the code can be confusing, and some of the functionalities don't seem to work (e.g. I had trouble with getting the @auth directive working, etc.).

Overall, in terms of content's quality, this is better than some of the other NewLine books that I've read recently.