// the find
leerob/mastering-nextjs
A free video course for building static and server-side rendered applications with Next.js and React.
A video course from 2019 teaching Next.js fundamentals — routing, data fetching, styling, auth, and deployment. The author has kept the README updated with deprecation warnings, so you know upfront what's stale. Good for someone starting with Next.js who wants a structured walkthrough, not for anyone building with the App Router.
The author annotates every lesson with green/yellow/red freshness indicators rather than pretending the course is still current — that's unusually honest for free content. Lee Robinson works at Vercel, so the material reflects real-world Next.js usage patterns rather than toy examples. The code samples are separated per lesson, so you can clone and run individual sections without fighting the rest of the repo. Coverage of SWR for data fetching was ahead of its time when this was recorded.
The course predates the App Router entirely — no Server Components, no `app/` directory, no `server actions`. What you learn here maps to the old `pages/` model, which is still valid but increasingly not what you'd reach for starting a project today. Several third-party tools taught here are dead or deprecated (StaticKit acquired, Theme UI largely abandoned, `getInitialProps` officially discouraged). Last push was 2023, and Next.js has had two major releases since then with no corresponding updates. The repo is essentially a time capsule with good annotations, not an active learning resource.