hey everyone my name is vishwas and welcome to a brand new series on next jazz for beginners in this series we will start from scratch and learn the different concepts in next year's in this introductory video i will briefly talk about the what and why of next years and also the prerequisites to get started all right let's begin with what is next.js the docs define nextgs as the react framework for production and it is this line which i want to break down further to help you understand what exactly is next.js now if you think about building applications with just react you know that it's not quite possible to build a full feature-rich application ready to be deployed for production react is a library for building user interfaces it is responsible for only the view layer of an application and you as the developer have to make decisions on other features of the app for example how would you implement routing styling authentication etc nextgs on the other hand is a react framework so it is a package that uses react for building user interfaces but it also comes loaded with a lot more features that enable you to build full-fledged production ready applications features exactly like routing styling authentication bundle optimization etc there's no need to install additional packages xjs provides everything for you you do have to keep in mind though that next gs living true to the name of being a framework does have opinions and conventions which need to be followed to implement the above set features however we don't have to worry much about that as there are conventions that have emerged from a team with years of experience writing react apps for production so to reiterate nexus is a react framework for building production ready applications all right now that we know what nextgs is let's see why you might want to learn it the why again stems from the fact that nexus simplifies the process of building a react application for production let me list down some of the noteworthy features which you would probably want in a react application which nexus provides out of the box the first one is file based routing when building a react app you need to install a third-party routing package configure it and add code every time you need to create a route next yes provides what is known as file based routing to simplify this task the second feature is pre-rendering this means that nexjs generates html for each page in advance instead of having it all done by client-side javascript pre-rendering can result in better performance and seo which is something we all want the third feature is api routes and this might be a surprise to most of you but let me tell you that you can create apis with nextgs so nexus is really a full stack framework if you think about it you can write the frontend code in react but also write apis that can be called by the react app nexus also supports css modules which saves you the time of choosing a css library of course you are allowed to use a css framework like tailwind or even a css in js library like style components for example but next year's supports css modules out of the box the fifth feature is authentication nexus supports multiple authentication patterns each designed for different use cases last but not the least nextgs provides a dev build system and a well optimized production build system so that you can focus more on the code and less on the configuration it is a culmination of all these features which makes nextgs an amazing framework to work with and if you haven't guessed already these are the features you're going to learn in detail throughout the series also just so you know i might refer to next jazz as just next many times in the series so please don't get confused now then what are the prerequisites to get started with next.js html css and javascript fundamentals are absolutely necessary we will be making use of es6 plus so make sure you have an understanding of the modern javascript features as well next is a react framework which implies you also need to have a solid understanding of react fundamentals you don't have to be an expert by any means but concepts like function components props state jsx hooks and so on are required if you are new to react i have an extensive tutorial series that covers react end to end so make sure to check that out my goal is to make sure we all advance from a complete beginner to being an expert in next years all the source code related to the series can be found in my github repo for which the link is present in the description all right then with this introduction let's get started with a simple hello world application in the next video thank you guys for watching make sure to subscribe to the channel and i'll see you all in the next one