Introduction to Next.js Course Overview

[00:00:00]
>> All right, so course, format. Basically, in this course, like I said, you're gonna be following along with me as I go through these topics in real time. But like I said, there's no pressure for you to keep up with me. Not that I'm going to be going fast or not that you can't keep up.

[00:00:14] It's just there's no pressure because most of the stuff is gonna be in this actual curriculum here that you can copy and paste. And if not, we actually do have a repo here at my GitHub. So hendrixer/nextjs-course-app, you can go there, you can actually go to the repo.

[00:00:29] And what I've done there is for every major checkpoint, I've made a branch that you can check out too. So for instance, all throughout the lesson, you'll see something like this at the end of the lesson that says, hey, you can check out to this branch. And you'll be at the completion of this lesson.

[00:00:45] So this this is what the lesson looks like when you're done. So if you didn't feel like following along, it was too much, or for whatever reason, if I'm going too fast. You can always check out to that branch and catch up to where we are or whenever you would like to.

[00:00:57] So that's there for you as well. But we will just be starting from scratch this repost here as a reference for you to catch up. And as far as what we're going to be making in this course, because I like to tie in learning something with actually making something.

[00:01:12] Even if it is trivial, I still think it just solidifies some of the topics. We'll be building a SaaS note taking app basically, it's very simple and I kept it simple on purpose because I really want to focus on the Next.js specifics. And not have some really complicated feature-heavy application get in the way.

[00:01:29] I feel like we've all know how to build apps before. So let's just keep it simple and focus on the actual framework. So that's what I'll do. And that's actually my philosophy throughout this whole course is just try to keep everything else out of the way and focus on the Next.js specifics.

[00:01:42] So you'll see me glossing over things that are required by Next.js, because I don't think it's important to learn Next.js. But obviously, I'm here to answer any questions, if you feel like I'm glossing over something that's important, you can ask a question. And I will be, interacting with you all to ask, hey, do you want me to go back and talk about this a little bit?

[00:02:01] But I can assure you that you'll get what you need from this course when it comes to Next.js. Here's a little legend that you'll might want to check out because I'll have like these little asides or these little quotes all throughout the curriculum. So if you see something like this, it's a tip.

[00:02:16] I'll usually say something like, hey, I recommend using this or doing that or go check this out. So you'll see this sometimes. A reminder is when I'm just reminding you like, hey, by the way, remember, this is how this works, so don't forget. Careful, you might see me warn you like, don't do this for this reason, or be careful this might happen.

[00:02:35] We talked about the lesson branch, check out the git branch name. Summary is sometimes I'll just have a really long explanation about something and if you don't feel like reading it, you'll just see a TLDR here, too long didn't read. And then extra wow first typo, I just noticed that.

[00:02:53] And then the next thing is you'll see some extra info here. So sometimes I will deep dive on stuff, because I just can't help it, and I think it'll be very helpful. So you'll see me just take off and deep dive on a topic for a little bit that I think people would like to know about.

[00:03:08] Let's go into the setup. So what are you gonna need to actually do this course? This is it. You really only need Node.js greater than 10. I'm using version 12.8, I believe, so you can go to that version if you'd like. But I believe anything over 10 should be fine.

[00:03:27] So you should be good there. I like to use nvm or n to manage my node versions. So I recommend you do that as well. You can easily switch between them and, you avoid the whole, permissions issue when you install node globally and things like that. And then you also need npm or yarn.

[00:03:46] npm comes installed with node, so you should have that already. I'm going to be using yarn. I don't think yarn is specifically better than npm, is that I switched a long time ago. And now that npm is better, I just don't feel like switching back. That's it, I think they're both great tools.

[00:04:00] You can use whichever one you want, but I'm just going to use yarn here. So that's pretty much what I'll be doing, and that's it. You don't really need anything else for this specific course. So now what are you gonna learn? Yeah, you're learn Next.js. But what specifically because there's a lot there's so much into Next.js.

[00:04:21] And I don't say that to say that it's a complicated framework. It's definitely a complicated framework to make but because of that, it's easy for us to use. And there was so much that went into me deciding what I wanted to teach in this course because, like I said, I know this framework from so many angles.

[00:04:39] From integrating with it on lower level primitives to using it, building static sites. So I kinda know it from all angles, so I'm always trying to pick and choose which will be best to talk about. So here's pretty much what I decided to cover in this course. And again, this is not like a strict list of these are only things I'm going to be talking about because I'm not.

[00:04:59] If you know me, I'm gonna go off on tangents and just ramble about things that I think would be really cool and I'll do that. But as far as like the text and the stuff that you see on this website it's mostly gonna follow this. So, what is Next.js?

[00:05:13] How does Next.js compared to React? When would you use it, getting started, creating pages and components. Things like SEO static and dynamic routing, navigating, styling, API routes. Yep, API routes, fetching data, prerendering, deployment, and a little bit of JAMstack stuff. So it's a lot, going to happen they were just going to see that it's just so delightful to work with Next.js, they make all of this pretty easy.

[00:05:45] So I'm super excited to just have everyone know how to use it. Any questions on that with the Next.js and what we're gonna learn? Is there something specific that someone was looking forward to learning that I didn't say here?
>> Think just a lot of people are using Gatsby it sounds like so.

[00:06:07]
>> Lot of people using Gatsby.
>> You'll get into that later.
>> Yeah, definitely get into Gatsby because as much as I use Next.js, I also use a lot of Gatsby, and I work with the Gatsby team on integrations. The same way I work with the Next team.

[00:06:19] So I feel pretty versed in Gatsby as well. In fact, this website is built on Gatsby. So yeah, I can talk about Gatsby as much as you all need me to.