Full-Stack React With Phoenix (Chapter 10 | Moving Forward)

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Coding Artist

4 min readAug 4, 2017

In just 9 chapters, we’ve learned the fundamentals of full-stack web development using Phoenix on the backend and React on the frontend. You should have enough knowledge to create your own full-stack apps and dive deeper into Phoenix and Elixir. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed this book so much that you have a similar feeling to the “show hole”.

Just like finishing a show on Netflix, you may be wondering what to do next. To wrap up this book, I’ll provide a few suggestions for what I recommend to learn next.

Recommend Learning

Phoenix Version 1.3

Out of anything you could learn, I would do this next. Phoenix has released an updated version since the release of this book.

Fortunately, it’s backward compatible and there’s plenty of information on what has changed and how to adjust existing projects via the official documentation.

There is also a write-up that can be found here covering the important changes with the new release and how to reimplement things accordingly.

Redux

Redux is a buzz word that is often thrown around when looking at React tutorials.

It’s one of those things that you start using and you wonder: “Why did I ever not do this before?” The issue is that this has caused a lot of tutorials to implement Redux in tutorials without much explanation. For that reason, I purposely kept Redux out of this book. Although, it would have made some things that we were doing much smoother.

Essentially, Redux provides an alternative to having a bunch of different local states managing data. Local states can get quite confusing to keep track of all the data in your entire React application much like managing your own money without a bank would be confusing.

Redux solves this issue by storing all of your data in one central location and allowing all your components access to read and request changes.

I wrote an ebook called Redux From Scratch which takes you through the basics of implementing Redux in full-stack React development.

React VR

If you’re looking for a more creative, experimental skill to learn next. Consider learning the basics of React VR and adding your own Phoenix backed.

I wrote a book called Learn React VR which takes you through all the fundamentals.

Elixir

In this book, we wrote Phoenix code was built off of the Elixir language. Although we covered the basics of Elixir, there’s still a ton more that you could do.

I recommend trying to reimplement Python scripts in Elixir and checking out the book Programming Elixir 1.3.

GraphQL

Instead of doing RESTful APIs like, we did in this book, GraphQL makes some significant improvements.

GraphQL provides a way to describe data in your API using queries.

I won’t bother explaining what it is because this article does a fabulous job.

Once you read through that, the official documentation is a solid place to start learning.

Preact

Preact is a fast 3kB alternative to React with the same ES6 API. In other words, it’s React but leaner and faster with only a few changes to get started.

Create Your Own Product

While this is not a technology to learn, you can try to create your own React/Phoenix app as a learning experience. In my opinion, why not turn your side project into some sort of product? In other words, try out your own React/Phoenix project and see if you can monetize it in the process.

Help Support the Author

I don’t have much to say other than a big “thank you”. It’s people who take the time to read and provide feedback on my content that keeps me fueled.

I’ve put hours and hours and hours and hours into providing content for absolutely free. If you would like to help support me for all the hard work that has gone into providing people free content, please pick up on of my ebooks and consider backing me on Patreon.

Thanks again,
Mike Mangialardi
Founder of Coding Artist