Preface

👋 Hello there, dear reader 😃. Welcome to the Guide! We are John and Loren, your authors. John created jQuery, and Loren is slightly less famous but writes good 👌. We’re here to tell you about GraphQL, the system we believe will eclipse REST as the best way to fetch data from servers. We’ll get into why in Chapter 1, but for now, here’s the story of this book:

GraphQL was released in mid 2015, and its adoption has been accelerating ever since. In 2016, Github switched its API from REST to GraphQL. In 2017, AWS launched a GraphQL-based platform for building apps. Both npm and the State of JavaScript survey named 2018 the year of GraphQL. John and Loren both realized early on that A) GraphQL was going to be very important for app development, and B) a great book on GraphQL didn’t yet exist! We each decided independently to write one, but then we found each other and—over schnitzel at a biergarten in Brooklyn—decided to join forces.

We’ve written the complete reference: what GraphQL is, why to use it, and most importantly, how to use it—on the server, in the browser, on mobile, with React, React Native, Vue, Node, Kotlin, and Swift. We’ll take you step-by-step through building an app, so you can see the practical need behind each part of GraphQL. We’re doing it as an e-book so we can always keep it up to date. A physical book would quickly fall behind best practices in such a fast-moving space.

We’d like to thank everyone who helped out with this book, including our technical reviewers Shawn Wang, Tom Coleman, Brad Crispin, Abhi Aiyer, Oleksandr Bordun, Heather Armstrong, Justin Krup, Melek Hakim, Kamal Radharamanan, Lewi Gilamichael, and Enno Thoma, our designer Genki Hagata, and our copy editors Rachel Lake, Lauren Itzla, and Paul Ramshaw. We’d also like to thank our sponsors—MongoDB, Auth0, and Hasura—and our beta readers for their support prior to the book’s release. Finally, thank you to those who wrote the libraries on which this book is based, especially the GraphQL and Apollo communities.

If you’d like to improve this resource for those who read after you (or your future selves! 😄), we welcome your suggestions via the “Send feedback” link on the right side of the desktop web version of the book or via issues/PRs to the repo.

We’ve found that building software with GraphQL is less difficult and more fun, and we think you’ll be similarly impressed. We hope you enjoy 🤗.

John Resig and Loren Sands-Ramshaw

Brooklyn, New York

June, 2018