Building the Reading Tracker API with NestJS | CodeSignal Learn

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Building the Reading Tracker API with NestJS

Software Engineering

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6 courses

83 practices

6 hours

Learn backend development with NestJS by building a feature-rich Reading Tracker API. Explore modular architecture, DTOs, authentication, guards, and interceptors while implementing real-world features like user friendships, shared progress, and advanced data filtering and sorting.

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Certificate of Achievement

Verified skills you'll gain

DEVELOPING

API Integration, Design, & Development

INTERMEDIATE

Server-Side Programming

Tools you'll use

JWT

NestJS

TypeScript

Course 1

NestJS Fundamentals: Your First API

4 lessons

17 practices

You'll start your journey by scaffolding a new NestJS application with the CLI. Then, you'll create your first API endpoints, separate business logic into services, and connect to a mock in-memory database to manage your app's data.

Course 2

Building Core Features with Modules and DTOs

3 lessons

12 practices

You'll create a dedicated module for managing books, complete with endpoints for creating, reading, updating, and deleting records. You'll learn to validate incoming data using DTOs and handle dynamic route parameters to interact with specific resources.

Course 3

Secure Your API with Authentication and Authorization

4 lessons

15 practices

Add secure authentication and authorization to your Reading Tracker API. Implement user registration, login with JWT, and role-based access control to protect routes and enable admin-level actions for a production-ready backend.

Course 4

Enhancing Your API with Guards and Interceptors

3 lessons

11 practices

You’ll harden and polish the Reading Tracker API built in the first three courses. First, you’ll enforce ownership so users can only modify their own reading progress. Then you’ll add centralized request logging, standardize both success and error responses across the API, and finally refactor to a global JWT guard with a `@Public()` decorator so security is easy to scale.

Course 5

Managing User Friendships and Shared Progress

3 lessons

12 practices

Add social features to your reading tracker API. You’ll model friendships and friend requests, expose endpoints to send/accept/decline requests, list a user’s friends, and securely retrieve a friend’s reading progress—all while composing the existing UsersService and ReadingService.

Course 6

Advanced Filtering, Aggregation, and Sorting

4 lessons

16 practices

Enhance your Reading Tracker API with advanced catalog features—metadata, search, filtering, sorting, and analytics. Support per-user reading progress, shelves, and statistics to deliver a polished, frontend-ready experience.

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