Course Review: Webpack 2: The Complete Developer's Guide (Udemy)

Webpack is a tool so widely used for React applications (including at work) and keeping at bay the Javascript tooling madness, that I wanted to also learn how it works, and avoid mistakes I made in the past like ignoring grunt and then having a bad time just working locally with simple SPAs.

Review

This Udemy course includes around 5 hours of nicely done diagrams and code walkthroughs and demos so that we can learn quite a few things about Webpack. It not only teaches the tool itself, including quite a few gotchas and basic plugins, but also extra plugins listed for Babel, automating script bundles injection into index.html, chunk-hash into filenames, bundling CSS & outputing them as single CSS file (vs inlining), React & Redux specific setups, and advices like code splitting based on React-Router routes.

It is really well explained for somebody who has his/her Javascript obsolete (like me), and if anything, the author goes sometimes a bit slow and over-explaining, which is good for beginners. You can watch some portions at 1.5x without problems and still get everything.

After the broad topics, there are sections for developing with and deploying both static and non-static websites, some deployment examples (although all of them with utils so don't expect a detailed AWS S3 deploy) and explains how to use webpack middleware for Express (uses Node & Express as the backend server for the non-static website).

Considering it is a tool, so at least for me a topic that can easily get boring, it covered everything I expected, plus some extras you might find or not so interesting.