Learn Algolia, React-router and Realm

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

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Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

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React-router is the community favourite routing solution - it can handle all of your complex routing needs and in this lesson we’ll cover what’s needed to enable it’s use within Preact. https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router

Integrate react-router with Preact

React Router is a complete routing library for React.

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In this lesson, we’ll install React Router as a project dependency and add links that will update the url via pushState to avoid reloading our page on changes.

Add React Router to a Redux Application

In this lesson, we’ll wire up React Router to pass a url based filter parameter into our component and create a selector function to filter our state data between the store and our components by hooking into the `ownProps` parameter of `mapStateToProps`.

Filter State Data in Redux with a Selector Function and React Router

In this lesson we'll use the `match.path` value passed in by React Router to setup dynamic routes for Tabs. This will allow us to setup dynamic tabs which can be navigated to based upon the URL. With this pattern we can change the base path and our tab routes will automatically match and render correctly.

Create Nested Tab Routes with Dynamic Paths with React-Router

In this lesson we'll show how to setup the Prompt component from React Router. We'll prompt with a static message, as well as a dynamic method with the message as a function. Finally we'll show that you can return `true` from the message as a function to dynamically allow navigation.

Prevent Navigation with the React Router Prompt Component

In this lesson we'll show how the Link component `to` prop can receive an object. This allows  us to pass `state` to the route. With the nav state we destructure off of location we can determine if a user wants to open a modal or on a cold visit show an image embedded in the page.

Create a Modal Route with Link and Nav State in React Router

In this lesson we'll create a protected route just for logged in users. We'll combine a Route with a render prop and use a loggedIn prop to determine if the route should be allowed to be accessed. Finally we'll use nav state to preserve the location the user visited and redirect them back to the protected route once they login.

Create a ProtectedRoute Component in React Router

In this lesson we'll use the `matchPath` function exported by react-router to find active nested routes inside of a parent component. This technique can be used for comparing routes outside of a React component, or even inside of life cycle methods to do data loading.

Use matchPath to Match Nested Route Paths in Parent Routes with React-Router

This will get you started on how to setup the Javascript API client of Algolia search solution. To follow along the video having a free Algolia account already setup will make things easier (but is not required). Once the client is setup we will test it by pushing a couple of records to an index.  

Set up the Algolia JavaScript Client

SolidStart is a JavaScript Framework designed to build full-stack SolidJS apps and enhance your developer experience.

In this course, you will learn how to:
- Set up a SolidStart project
- Toggle different rendering modes
- Leverage file system routing to turn your files into routes
- Create API routes to expose some public endpoints
- Fetch, prefetch, update and cache your data
- Turn your functions and actions into server-executing ones
- Get rid of unnecessary network waterfalls by using Single Flight Mutations.

After this course, you should be able to leverage SolidStart to build your Solid applications.

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

SolidStart is a JavaScript Framework designed to build full-stack SolidJS apps and enhance your developer experience.

In this course, you will learn how to:
- Set up a SolidStart project
- Toggle different rendering modes
- Leverage file system routing to turn your files into routes
- Create API routes to expose some public endpoints
- Fetch, prefetch, update and cache your data
- Turn your functions and actions into server-executing ones
- Get rid of unnecessary network waterfalls by using Single Flight Mutations.

Getting Started with SolidStart

Bootstrap is an incredibly popular CSS framework designed to make your website look great on mobile and desktop.

By the end of this course, you'll be familiar with many of the popular classes and components that Bootstrap uses to apply in your own projects.

For each feature you build in the course, you'll get a sense for what the relevant classes do for those components and links to documentation for further exploration.

For the course demo application, we will analyze the landing pages of Microsoft and Apple to identify common components that are implemented. When these are identified, you'll implement these components yourself with Bootstrap.

You'll build several common UI elements such as a nav bar, a carousel of images, Cards, and Forms.

Through building these components, you'll understand what is behind the different classes Bootstrap gives you and get familiar with how it exposes flex and grid layout for you.

Cascading Style Sheets bring order and beauty to our applications.

Create Professional Responsive Websites using Bootstrap

This course is perfect for those looking for a lightweight alternative to NgRx Store that scales effortlessly.

Angular is a development platform for creating applications using modern web standards. Angular includes a wealth of essential features such as mobile gestures, animations, filtering, routing, data binding, security, internationalization, and beautiful UI components. It's extremely modular, lightweight, and easy to learn.

Scalable Signals Angular Architecture with NGRX Signal Store

Learn how the latest JavaScript features can help you improve your codebase. 

Learn the Latest ECMAScript Features (ES2024, ES2023, ...)

course repository: https://github.com/ducin/egghead-typescript/tree/brand-types-value-objects

TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

typescript

Domain Data Modelling using TypeScript Aliases, Brand Types and Value Objects

**Note:** This course is being actively developed and more lessons will be added in the future.

Cursor is an AI-enhnaced code editor that allows you to call upon the robots to refactor or stub out functions for you with natural language. 

In this course, John will show you workflows that will save you time and effort by utilizing the features such as its mult-line editing and context.

In particular, by giving Cursor's AI the proper context, whether that's lines of code or multiple files, you'll get better output when trying to extend or refactor logic that's present.


Bite-size video tutorials for badass web developers.

egghead

Productive Developer Workflows with AI Enhanced Cursor IDE

Learn the fundamentals of React Query by going through the basic API and then implementing search in an employee tracking app.

Simplify State Management with React Query

Vue (pronounced /vjuː/, like view) is a progressive framework for building user interfaces. Unlike other monolithic frameworks, Vue is designed from the ground up to be incrementally adoptable. The core library is focused on the view layer only, and is very easy to pick up and integrate with other libraries or existing projects. On the other hand, Vue is also perfectly capable of powering sophisticated Single-Page Applications when used in combination with modern tooling and supporting libraries.

Create Interactive 3D Experiences with TresJS

You've seen that Angular signals are here, and know that signal-components are coming up.

This marks a paradigm-shift towards reactive programming in Angular.

Are you ready?

What if you could start learning signals and feel pleased with your progress? And reach a point where you feel confident when using signals in production?

And feel ready when signal-based components come?

Changes are coming, and you can get ahead of them.

By taking this cousre you will learn how to:

- Create computed signals
- Share your signals in services
- Use and cleanup signal effects
- Turn signals into observables and vice versa
- ... and more

In 52 minutes over the course of 20 bite-sized lessons, you'll learn everything you need to know to take advantage of signals now and be prepared for signal-based components!

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Modernize State Management in Angular with Signals

Get started with Supabase on your machine

Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative. A service to:

- Listen to database changes.
- Query your tables, including filtering, pagination, and deeply nested relationships (like GraphQL).
- Create, update, and delete rows.
- Manage your users and their permissions.
- Interact with your database using a simple UI.

Supabase is not a 1-to-1 mapping of Firebase. Most notably, Supabase uses Postgres rather than a NoSQL store. 

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