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Praveen Durairaju
Praveen Durairaju

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The Learning Path to GraphQL for Fullstack Developers

GraphQL has been around for 6 years now and has really empowered frontend and fullstack developers with the ability to build backends easily. With tools like Hasura, developers focus only on writing custom logic code specific to the app, taking away the repetitive CRUD APIs.

Hasura gives you instant GraphQL and REST APIs on all your data. It sits in between your application and the data sources to give you the goodness of GraphQL, Authorization and a slew of security and monitoring features. The core Hasura GraphQL Engine is open source and we have a Cloud offering for managing infra and advanced production ready features.

We at Hasura, along with the community have created a series of open source tutorials starting from GraphQL Basics, Hasura Basics to full fledged frontend tutorials in various frameworks. You name it, we have it :)

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Begin your journey with GraphQL Basics

If you are completely new to GraphQL, we recommend taking our Introduction to GraphQL course. This will get you from Zero to GraphQL in less than an hour.

The key to learning GraphQL is to understand that it is just a query language and popular implementations on the client and server leverage existing JSON standards for requests and responses over HTTP.

Once you are familiar with this concept, it will become easier to grok the benefits of GraphQL. The Intro to GraphQL tutorial covers some fundamental concepts like

The three most common things you will encounter with GraphQL are

  • Queries
  • Mutations
  • Subscriptions

This along with the type system makes GraphQL the powerful self-serve API that everyone can use intuitively.

You will also understand the different approaches one can take while writing a GraphQL Server. Finally you will learn how GraphQL Clients make data fetching, consuming realtime subscriptions really easy.

Setup the backend with Hasura

Once you have understood what GraphQL is and the core concepts around it, you can progress to the easiest step in the journey. i.e Setting up a GraphQL API with Hasura.

We have put together a concise tutorial for Hasura Basics to create a production ready GraphQL API from scratch without writing much code. You will be able to use the power of database, set up Authorization rules for security and write custom business logic code specific to a realtime use case.

Once you go over this Hands-on tutorial, which should take about ~30 mins to an hour, you will be able to start integrating the GraphQL API with any frontend app.

Optional: Database Ninja

Hasura connects to a database (either PostgreSQL, MySQL or MS SQL etc) to give you a GraphQL API. Now if you are a frontend developer who is new to the database ecosystem, then you are covered with our database series.

The database tutorials will teach you core concepts around data modeling with examples of SQL statements and key fundamentals to know just enough to deploy an app in production.

Integrate GraphQL backend with frontend

Once you are familiar with GraphQL and setting up a backend with Hasura, you can start trying out the real power of GraphQL in the frontend app. In this frontend series, you will learn how modern GraphQL client side tooling can be integrated with a GraphQL backend like Hasura.

There are tutorials available in most popular frontend frameworks and mobile first languages.

The highlights of this series are the examples around consuming realtime subscriptions and patterns around handling data in cache.

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Join our GraphQL Learning Circles

Starting from November 2021, We’re going to host GraphQL Learning Circles to go over the various tutorials that we and the GraphQL community have created and contributed to on a weekly basis. If you’d like to host a GraphQL Learning Circle reach out to us on discord.

Do subscribe us on YouTube to get notified about the schedule for these live tutorials.

We would love to hear what you would like to see on the Hasura Learn portal. We are constantly updating the tutorials to keep in pace with industry standard language and framework versions and best practices.

Do check it out and spread the love :)

Top comments (1)

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pblgllgs profile image
pbl.gllgs

great post, so intuitive the tutorial of hashura, thanks a lot!!