Approaching our project

I firmly believe that the best motivation for learning new technology is a project that excites you that you can't wait to build. As an experienced developer, you've probably already built a number of successful commercial projects that share certain product features, design patterns, and even target audiences. In this book, I want you to build a project that feels like a breath of fresh air. A project, which you most likely wouldn't build in your day-to-day work. It has to be a fun endeavor, which will not only educate you but also satisfy your curiosity and stretch your imagination. However, assuming that you're a busy professional, this project shouldn't be a time-consuming, long-term commitment for you either.

Enter Snapterest—a web application that allows you to discover and collect public photos posted on Twitter. Think of it as a Pinterest (www.pinterest.com) with the only source of pictures being Twitter. We will implement a fully functional website with the following core functionalities:

• Receiving and displaying tweets in real time
• Adding and removing tweets to/from a collection
• Reviewing collected tweets
• Exporting a collection of tweets as an HTML snippet that you can share

When you start working on a new project, the very first thing that you do is to get your tools ready. For this project, we will be using a number of tools that you might not be familiar with, so let's discuss what they are, and how you can install and configure them.

If you have any trouble with installing and configuring tools and modules from this chapter, then go to https://github.com/PacktPublishing/React-Essentials-Second-Edition and create a new issue; describe what you're doing and what error message you're getting. I believe our community will help you to resolve your issue.

In this book, I'll assume that you're working on a Macintosh or Windows computer. If you're a Unix user, then most likely you would know your package manager very well, and it should be easy enough for you to install the tools that you will learn about in this chapter.

Let's start with the installation of Node.js.