The Road to GraphQL | Hacker News Reader

The Road to GraphQL

robinwieruch.de

219 pointsyannikyeo28 comments

Hello everyone. Author here :-) I released the book 48 hours ago and I am overwhelmed by the positive reactions. The last 10 months I put lots of work into it and finally released it as a top quality and up-to-date resource for people who want to learn GraphQL in JavaScript.

If you are interested in the content, checkout the release blog post that is used here on HN. The book comes with 4 applications, client- and server-side, that you will build along the way, 350 pages, 45+ exercises, 400+ code snippets.

I would be curious how you like the content, but also what other content you would have expected in this book. Thanks to all of you again!

Seems like a solid book to me. I wrote one myself in the last 3 months and now it seems like nothing compared to yours, haha.

I'll definitely read it. I like the fact that it focuses on Apollo and not Relay.

What's wrong with Relay ? (true question)

Nothing is wrong with it; it's just more opinionated than Apollo.

Great job. This is a great resource for a person like myself that is getting into the world of GraphQL

Thank you for creating this, Robin.

This looks awesome! I've been using essentially the same stack (postgres, sequelize, nodeJS, Apollo server + client) for ~1 year now and built it to be Relay compliant. I'm interested to see how our approaches compare. :)

>In another life, I wanted to do music[...]Eventually, I decided to code and started to enjoy it too. Still, music is one reason why I am staying partly in Berlin. Nowhere else, I believe, will you find such a great selection of electronic music.

:))

Listening to your SoundCloud now. You're an inspiration!

The chapters reads like the Apollo documentation. Does the book contains real world experience of topics like caching, CDN's, REST integration, deduplication of requests? Thanks for sharing this with the community!

Hello, author here :)

There are 4 applications the readers of this book are going to build along the way. I think that's more pragmatic than other programming books.

Most, not all, of the other mentioned topics are too niche to address them in a beginners GraphQL book that should be read by a broader audience IMO. But I keep these topics in a list to write supplementary blog posts about them.

Thanks for your insights on this! Helps a lot to identify the pain points the community has on this topic :)

I think it’s great that you reduce the price for countries that are less wealthy.

Where does it say that?

Unless I'm mistaken, the actual book itself is free too, which is generous.

When signing up for an account there's a message about Purchasing Parity Power for your country

Yes. I have PPP via this https://github.com/rwieruch/purchasing-power-parity Unfortunately I hit the API limit for this month for the third-party APIs the library is using. Hacker News ... :D

Hey, as a Palestinian student in Siberia, you're a really cool guy. Thanks for doing this. It's painful how many people charge the equivalent of my rent for a digital product and then wonder why Russia has such a high piracy rate.

I haven't read this yet, but I plan on purchasing it and working through it this weekend or next. Robin's "Road to React" really helped me cement my understanding of React and learn how to use it in a concrete way. The focus on refactoring in his previous book has been immensely helpful in my day job.

I think you will meet more refactoring in this book :) Great that you liked it!

Thanks for this, will be sharing with my team!

The "Graph" part is where this technology is interesting. I'm sure not everyone links together all their models, but if you do things right, you essentially can let the front end pull in very interesting relationships without having to set it all up yourself. Very cool stuff.

Is there any benefits for using Apollo with React ? It seems that Relay provides higher level abstractions that Apollo is lacking (because it is framework agnostic). It seems that every Apollo user is going to rebuild the abstractions already provided by React.

Apollo Client contributor and user here - which abstractions are you referring to?

I haven't read your work but it is nice to see more instruction on GraphQL being published. I think Apollo is a great choice for beginners and an appropriate choice for many projects in general - largely due to its framework ambiguity. I look forward to looking into your section on other options. It's good to keep perspective on that sort of thing and hard to do so when it involves such a learning curve.

An e-book is a good choice of format as well. I learned GraphQL from a video resource until I was competent enough to proceed with the (admittedly very good) documentation. I wish there had been a resource like this available.

For django there is graphene, with Django migrations, it really makes for the easiest way to build a backend outside of serverless.

This looks like a really good resource! Sadly at my work we are just finally getting most of our web stack on top of a REST API. So it may be a while before I get to work with something like this a production environment.

This is really cool! We have been waiting for this for a long time ...

Does anyone have a pdf copy of the book? I see that it is released for free, I just would prefer not to sign up for another service.

I don't like signing up for stuff either, but that is the price of the book: your email address.

Don't understand the down-votes here.

It's true!

Maybe it's not the best book on GraphQL, I don't know, but it is miles better than most paid tech-books out there.

The book is self-published and the author isn't well known, so he needs to something to build an audience. Giving them such a good book for an email is a nice way to do so.

I'm not well known either and my publisher only gives away one chapter for an email and then you have to buy it.

I can understand the dislike of signing up to a service but in this case that's the price of the book. I also dislike signing up to various services, but I did for Road to React and I can confirm I haven't recieved any spam. In fact the first message I recieved was about this new book. I wouldn't worry too much.

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