Full-Stack Integration & Deployment — Prerequisites
What You Need Before Starting
This is the capstone technology of the Web Development academy. That's not a soft framing — the prerequisites below are real, hard requirements, not a suggested warm-up. Nothing here is re-taught; every prior technology is used directly, by name.
Required: Frontend track fluency
React — components, props, state, hooks (useState, useEffect) — needs to be comfortable, not brand-new. Next.js's routing, data-fetching, and environment variable conventions (NEXT_PUBLIC_) are used directly throughout. If you're still looking up basic React syntax, finish this academy's React and Next.js technologies first — this course starts from "you can already build a working UI" and moves straight to connecting it to a real backend.
Required: Backend track fluency
Node.js fundamentals, Express (routing, middleware, the next() contract, error-handling middleware), REST API design (resource-oriented URLs, status codes, request/response shapes), and this academy's Authentication technology (issuing and verifying tokens, protecting routes with middleware) — all four are assumed at working fluency, not introductory familiarity. This course's Intermediate module, for example, wires together an auth flow using patterns your Authentication technology already taught in depth; it does not re-explain what a JWT is.
Recommended, not hard-blocking: Databases and DevOps familiarity
Basic familiarity with this platform's own Databases academy (specifically PostgreSQL) and DevOps academy (specifically Docker and CI/CD Pipelines) genuinely helps, but isn't a hard prerequisite — this course teaches just enough of each to show how they integrate into a full-stack app, and explicitly points to those academies for real depth at every relevant section. Arriving here without having touched either academy yet is workable; arriving here without React or Express fluency is not.
What you do *not* need yet
Quick self-check
Can you, right now and without looking anything up: build a React component that calls a REST API endpoint, write an Express route with auth-checking middleware that returns a proper JSON error on failure, and explain what a JWT is and where it gets verified? If all three feel solid, start at Fundamentals. If any of them feel shaky, that's a real signal to go back to the specific prior technology (React/Next.js, Express, REST API Design, or Authentication) first — this course will not slow down to re-teach it.