The structure of this course - React.js Tutorial

- [Instructor] Alright, so in order to help you understand how this course is going to work in a little bit more detail, what I'd like to do is right up front give you the basic overall structure that we're going to be following in this course. Obviously, authentication is a pretty deep topic, so there's lots of things that we're going to be talking about here, and it's important for you to understand how they're going to fit together. So really, first of all, there's two main goals of this course. The first is for you to understand and apply authentication with full-stack React, right? So basically at the end of this course, you should be able to confidently add basic authentication to a full-stack React app, which is something that will amaze interviewers, trust me. And the second one here is we're going to develop sort of like a full-stack authentication template that you can use so that in the future when you want to create other applications and know that you're going to need authentication for those, you can just copy this template and not have to set up everything all over again. All right, so those are the two main goals. Let's talk about the basic structure as I said. The first thing we're going to do is talk about the fundamentals of user authentication. So we're going to talk about what user authentication is in the first place, as well as some other key concepts behind user auth. After that, this is a very important part, so do not skip this part. At least, if you want to follow along, I wouldn't recommend skipping it. Project setup, this is where we're going to talk about the basic structure of the project itself and how all the pieces fit together. So if you skip this, you might just find yourself a little bit confused as to what all the different pieces of code, what all the files are in the project. After we do that, we're going to take a look at how to add basic user authentication to a full-stack MERN app, right? Now, this is going to be a slightly simplified MERN app. In fact, it's going to be like a MERN app without the M, so an ERN app. Basically what I've done is instead of using MongoDB, which really has just in the past, complicated things a little bit, I'm just going to use a very simple file-based JSON database in order to store all of our data. This will make things a lot easier as we go through the course, as you'll see. And this is going to include things like how to sign a user up, very important thing there, how to let them create an account. We'll also take a look at, once the user is signed up, how do we log them in and out? We'll take a look at how to create private routes in a React application as well as on the backend. And finally, we'll take a look at the basics of using JSON web tokens, which really form the beating heart, so to speak, of a lot of modern authentication. All right, and after that, after we've learned all of the basics, we're going to go through a few more very important and I think very beneficial parts of the course. The first is email verification. So we'll take a look at not only how to send emails, but also how to incorporate all of the necessary logic of the email verification flow, right? To make sure that a user has signed up with a valid email. We'll also take a look at the flow for resetting passwords and how to implement that. And we'll also take a look at a few other authentication options, right? So now that you know how to implement your own authentication flow, what are some other possibilities that you could use? All right, and last but not least, we're going to take a look at a few best practices for authentication in React. And as I said, with the project setup, it would not be wise to skip this one. There are lots of very interesting techniques in this last section that you'll really want to be familiar with in order to make sure that your users have the maximum security that they deserve. And well, that is the basic structure of the course. So now you know what to expect.