Book Image

Beginning React

By : Andrea Chiarelli
Book Image

Beginning React

By: Andrea Chiarelli

Overview of this book

Projects like Angular and React are rapidly changing how development teams build and deploy web applications to production. In this book, you’ll learn the basics you need to get up and running with React and tackle real-world projects and challenges. It includes helpful guidance on how to consider key user requirements within the development process, and also shows you how to work with advanced concepts such as state management, data-binding, routing, and the popular component markup that is JSX. As you complete the included examples, you’ll find yourself well-equipped to move onto a real-world personal or professional frontend project.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Definition of a Component


As defined in the previous chapter, components are the fundamental building blocks of React. Virtually any visual item in a user interface can be a component. From a formal point of view, we would say that a React component is a piece of JavaScript code defining a portion of a user interface.

Consider the following code in a file:

import React from 'react';

class Catalog extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return <div><h2>Catalog</h2></div>;
  }
}

export default Catalog;

This is an ECMAScript 2015 module, defining a basic React component.

It imports the React namespace from the react module and defines the Catalog class by extending the React.Component class. The module exports the Catalog class as a default export.

The interesting part of this definition is the implementation of the render() method.

The render() method defines the visual part of the component. It may execute any JavaScript code, and it should return a markup expression...