Full Stack Web Development Website

This website presents information on the book and redirects references from the book.

Accessing the Website

If no query params are provided, this website serves as the informational site for the book. The content will be updated closer to publication time.

Using the Website to Redirect to Book References

The user can include a reference number from the book as a query parameter. If a query parameter is included and the reference is recognized, the site redirects to the URL of the reference. By convention, references are numbered sequentially starting at 1 in each chapter. The chapter number and a period precedes each reference number to make it unique. So, for example, the first reference in Chapter 1 will be labeled 1.1 and can be accessed using the URL https://webdevbook.com?1.1.

Automatically Generating the References

In the scripts/ folder, the file util.js contains reflistToRefmap, a Node.js script that takes two parameters as input:

• fname, a text file containing a chapter bibliography generated by Zotero. The bibliography is assumed to have a list of sequentially numbered references (e.g., [3.1], [3.2]). For each reference, the reference entry is assumed to have a URL that starts with http:// or https://.
• x, an integer indicating the number of the chapter. Note: To prepare the file for processing: 1. Create a new file ChxPUB.docx. 2. "unlink Citations" in the Zotero toolbar. 3. Do a search/replace, replacing '[' with '[x.' where x is the chapter number. BE CAREFUL: You need to check each replacement, because many instances of '[' lie in code listings and should not be changed. 4. Copy/paste references list into Chx.txt.

reflistToRefmap produces a file chxrefs.js that contains JavaScript code to an entry to the refmap associative array for each chapter reference. An example of such code is refmap['1.1'] = 'https://google.com';.

Here are the steps to updating the website with chapter references

1. Copy the chapter's bibliography generated by Zotero into a file chxrefs.txt.
2. Change into the scripts/ directory and run the reflistToRefmap script like so:

npx run-func util.js reflistToRefmap ch3refs.txt 3

Notice that you need to specify two parameters: the name of the file containing the references and the chapter number. If all goes well, you should see a console transcript of the script processing each line. The last line of the console output should look like this:

References successfully written to 'ch3refs.js'.

3. Include the chapter references JavaScript file you just generated into index.html before main.js, e.g.,

<script src="scripts/ch3refs.js"></script>

4. Commit the changes, e.g.,

git commit -m "Added references for Chapter 3"

5. Push the changes to the remote.

git push origin main