Learn Apollo, Jasmine and Scss

It's tempting to pick up a framework which has preselected flexbox or grid as the layout tool of choice, but it's important to learn when and why to use each method. This leads to slimmer stylesheets which results in better site performance, and less likelihood for "hacks" to make one method do what the other does inherently better. 

Throughout this collection, we will be progressively styling a responsive landing page template while building your knowledge on when to select grid or flexbox for any layout scenario. Spoiler alert: sometimes the best solution is using both!

The specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent.

flexbox

Create a Landing Page with CSS Grid and Flexbox

GraphQL is a fan favorite for good reason. It lets a client make specific, complex, and/or aggregate queries for data, and it’s user-friendly to boot.

If you’ve been meaning to learn GraphQL and start harnessing its powers, this is a great place to start.

This course is for GraphQL newbies with a basic understanding of React. It focuses on the client-side implementation of GraphQL usage using the Apollo client.

We’ll start with a guide on how to add the Apollo client to an existing project, then move on using the Query and Mutation components to fetch and manipulate data using a GraphQL API.

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.

react

GraphQL Data in React with Apollo Client

CSS uses a global namespace for CSS Selectors that can easily result in style conflicts throughout your application when building an application using modern web components. You can avoid this problem by nesting CSS selectors or use a styling convention like BEM but this becomes complicated quickly and won’t scale.

CSS-in-JS avoids these problems entirely by generating unique class names when styles are converted to CSS. This allows you to think about styles on a component level with out worrying about styles defined elsewhere.

In this course, you will learn how to express popular SCSS (Sass) language features using latest JavaScript features. We will convert simple examples from SCSS to CSS-in-JS. As a designer or (S)CSS developer, you should be able to follow without extensive JavaScript knowledge, understanding SCSS is required though. We will not be using any particular CSSinJS libraries. Instead, we will focus on a base knowledge you need later if you use any CSSinJS library.

Sass is the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world.

scss

Convert SCSS (Sass) to CSS-in-JS

Most developers would raise an eyebrow if they saw database queries being done in a for-loop, but GraphQL provides just enough abstraction that it isn't always intuitive exactly how many times each resolver fires at scale, nor is it obvious how to batch operations efficiently and still return the correct results to the correct consumer.

You'll learn how to use the GraphQL Data Loader pattern to improve the performance of your application, and solve scaling issues before they become a problem.

To do this, we'll first implement our own naive version of the pattern to understand why the API is shaped how it is. Then we will switch over to the official DataLoader package and explore the benefits further.

## Skills you'll Gain

- Implement a cache layer to optimize your requests
- Batch requests so your Database isn't overloaded
- Build a performant GraphQL API

Apollo provides a universal GraphQL API on top of your existing services, so you can build new application features fast without waiting on backend changes.

apollo

Use GraphQL Data Loaders to Prevent Scaling Issues by Batching & Caching Database Requests

Have you ever wished for access to conditionals or iteration when writing styles? How cool would it be to use functions to write styles? SCSS has that and more! SCSS is a superset of CSS. Any valid CSS is SCSS, they even have the same syntax. SCSS borrows features from other languages to write smarter, reusable and more readable styles. This course will focus on how to use SCSS’s more useful features, compare them against each other and assess when their usage is appropriate.

Learn the Best and Most Useful SCSS

At the core of a good client-side GraphQL library is a cache. The cache is very important for improving the efficiency of your data retrieval and providing your users with a clean user experience.

In this course, we're going to see how Apollo's powerful cache helps easily solve complex UI problems, such as pagination, handling loading and error states, optimistic updates, and minimizing network requests.

We'll start from the basics, and look at how to make queries and mutations, but then we'll look at how the cache is behind most of Apollo's immediate benefits. We'll explore in-depth how it works, how it stores data, and how we can manually modify it manually for advanced scenarios.

Even if your backend doesn't fully support GraphQL yet, we'll look at how to write GraphQL queries in your components that retrieve local client state under the hood - or that can even make REST API calls.

Manage State in React Apps with Apollo Client and GraphQL

**Get started building dynamic apps with GraphQL and Vue3.**

As your app scales, so does the complexity of managing your routes and API endpoints. 

It gets tiresome. 

But this aspect of web development can be streamlined considerably! 

GraphQL is a powerful tool for querying and mutating your data. In this course, we are going to create a Vue3 app that leverages GraphQL to create a dynamic front end.

But what does GraphQL *do*? 

Its power comes from giving you a *single* endpoint that you make all your queries to. Instead of making a request to a specific endpoint and getting a fixed response, you can write flexible queries to a single endpoint.

![REST vs GraphQL diagram](https://res.cloudinary.com/dg3gyk0gu/image/upload/v1638989029/course-resources/create-a-graphql-powered-vue-3-application/rest_vs_graphql.png)

Vue3 has some great new features that we will be exploring, such as the setup script syntax. But you won't just be exploring Vue3's new features, we will be building a dynamic front end with an index, view pages generated from data, and forms.

To make our frontend dynamic, we will be powering it with GraphQL. We start with the basics by creating queries but we move on to more advanced topics such as query params, mutations, and pagination.

To actually use GraphQL in our Vue app we will be using the Vue Apollo Client. Which gives us convenient methods for making queries, getting the data back into the client, and handling errors.

## Gain These Skills

- Add GraphQL to a Vue 3 project
- Query and mutate data with GraphQL in Vue 3
- Create data-driven views with Apollo client
- Handle routing within a Vue 3 project
- Implement optimistic updates and infinite scroll

## Prerequisites

Some entry-level knowledge on Vue and GraphQL is recommended, but this course is beginner-friendly enough to where it isn't a strict requirement.

If you want to build a deeper foundation for both Vue and GraphQL we have a couple of awesome courses that you can hack through. 

For Vue, check out **[The Beginner's Guide to Vue 3](https://egghead.io/courses/the-beginner-s-guide-to-vue-3-1c46da8b),** which is also by Kevin. It's great for both newcomers to web dev and veterans alike. 

And for GraphQL, work through **[GraphQL Query Language](https://egghead.io/courses/graphql-query-language)** from Eve Porcello. Eve literally wrote the book on learning GraphQL and her course is similarly top quality. 

## What's Next?

Progressive Web Apps are a more advanced topic, and converting an existing Single Page **Vue** App into one makes for an excellent follow-up project. **->** [Offline-First Progressive Web Apps (PWA) in Vue.js](https://egghead.io/courses/offline-first-progressive-web-apps-pwa-in-vue-js)

If you want to take your **GraphQL** game to the next level, then becoming an expert in designing GraphQL schemas is the way to go. **->** [Designing GraphQL Schemas](https://egghead.io/courses/designing-graphql-schemas-99db)

And I know the following recommendation is a React course but *it really is that good*. You will learn some **advanced** techniques that will be applicable to Vue or any other Apollo compatible framework that you work with. **->** [Manage State in React Apps with Apollo Client and GraphQL](https://egghead.io/courses/manage-state-in-react-apps-with-apollo-client-and-graphql-a45b3b89)

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 a GraphQL Powered Vue 3 Application

Techniques to improve your CSS, Sass, and HTML implementations for everyday scenarios. 

Learn the Fundamentals of CSS and Sass to Create Modern and Responsive Layouts 

Copy/pasting the same code is redundant and updating copy/pasted code slows development velocity. Mixins are reusable chunks of code that are included, similar to calling a function, instead of copy/pasted.

Mixins have some nice features:
- Arguments just like functions.
- Arguments can have default values and optional values.
- Named arguments allow us to use optional and default arguments when the mixin is included.
- Variable arguments allow us to have a dynamic number of arguments when the mixin is included.
- The @content directive allow us to add additional styles when the mixin is included.

In this lesson we learn how to DRY up the code with the SCSS @mixin directive and make copy/paste a thing of the past.

Reuse Styles with the SCSS @mixin Directive

Updating the same color or metric multiple times is no fun. SCSS variables improve maintainability by allowing one name to represent a value that can be used anywhere. SCSS variables also give us the power of creating our own naming conventions to express the intent of specific values. In this lesson we learn how to use SCSS variables to assign user friendly names to colors/metrics so one value change will update that value in all the right places.

Use SCSS Variables for Readable and Maintainable Stylesheets

SCSS nesting can produce DRYer code by targeting child elements without having to write the parent class. Nesting up to 3 levels deep can help us understand relationships between styles. The SCSS parent selector represents the parent class, so it can DRY up targeting pseudo-elements/classes and be an asset for naming conventions. In this lesson we learn how to remove the redundancy of targeting pseudo-elements/classes, and child elements by taking advantage of SCSS’s nesting and parent selectors.

Organize Styles with SCSS Nesting and the Parent Selector

In this lesson we learn how to set up SCSS  and transpile your SCSS code into CSS with node-sass.

Transpile SCSS to CSS using node-sass

Tired of dealing with monolithic CSS files? Are requests for multiple CSS files hurting your performance? In this lesson we learn how to separate our styles with SCSS partials, and how SCSS imports compile to one file so there's only one request.

Organize SCSS into Multiple Files with Partials

We can write reusable styles with the SCSS @extend or @mixin directives. Which one is better? It depends. A better question is, how do they differ?
Extends:
change the source order, mixins don’t.
maintain relationships, mixins don’t.
share inherited traits, mixins don’t.
can extend multiple classes, mixins don’t.
can create multiple class declarations in the compiled CSS, mixins don’t.
can use the placeholder selector, mixins don’t.

Mixins:
can accept arguments, extends don’t.
can pass additional content, extends don’t.
repeat code when compiled, extends group class names together.
work well wIth media queries, extends have a limited interaction wIth media queries.

In this lesson we learn about writing reusable styles with the @extend directive and how it compares to the @mixin directive.


Reuse Styles with the SCSS @extend Directive

Writing similar classes with minor variations, like utility classes, can be a pain to write and update. Sometimes just a single character is the only difference between classes and updating the defining parameter means we need to change it for every class name and value. We can write a class one time and the @for directive can write all the minor variations for us. If the similar classes need to be updated, with the help of the @for directive, they only need to be updated once. In this lesson we learn how to leverage the power of the SCSS @for control directive to relieve the pain.

Write similar classes with the SCSS @for Control Directive

The SCSS @for directive is great when we know how many iterations are required and we only need 1 variable. What if we need multiple variables to iterate over data sets? Hello SCSS maps and the @each control directive! In this lesson, we’ll check out iterating with lists and looping over data sets with maps and the @each directive.

Loop Over Data with the SCSS @each Control Directive

Writing SCSS @functions is similar to writing functions in other programming languages; they can accept arguments and have return statements. SCSS provides a ton of great features, but sometimes we need to roll our own function. We can do that too! They’re useful when the desired functionality isn’t available from the built in SCSS functions and a mixin just won’t do. In this lesson, we learn how and when to use SCSS function directives.


Write Custom Functions with the SCSS @function Directive

We can use javascript for color and opacity variations, math, list and map logic or to see if something exists. SCSS includes functions for a wide range of common use cases for logic in our styles. In this lesson we look at some of the more useful color functions to improve development velocity, readability, and simplify the code. Be sure to checkout all the SCSS functions: http://sass-lang.com/documentation/Sass/Script/Functions.html

Use Standard Built-in SCSS Functions for Common Operations:

n this lesson, you’ll learn how to write a SCSS mixin to generate styles for variations of background-images. We’ll look at using SCSS lists to interpolate dynamic class names and property attributes and output icons at different sizes.

If you need the ability to add or edit icons on a regular basis, having a SCSS mixin do the heavy lifting of calculating `background-position`, `background-size` and creating selectors will save you lots of time and manual work.

_Note:_ this lesson assumes you have an understanding of SCSS, mixins and already have a process to compile SCSS.

Automate SVG Sprite Background Image Variations with a SCSS Mixin

webpack is a tool to build JavaScript modules in your application. To start using webpack from its cli or api, follow the Installation instructions. webpack simplifies your workflow by quickly constructing a dependency graph of your application and bundling them in the right order. webpack can be configured to customise optimisations to your code, to split vendor/css/js code for production, run a development server that hot-reloads your code without page refresh and many such cool features.

webpack

Poi uses sensible defaults for importing `.css` files. Sass isn't included by default, but simply installing the required packages gets you up-and-running. This lesson walks you through importing `css` and `scss` files into your project.

Compile CSS or Sass with Poi

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

In this lesson Trevor looks at testing AngularJS controllers with scope inheritance with Jasmine and test spies.

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