Book Image

Getting Started with React Native

By : Holmes, Bray
Book Image

Getting Started with React Native

By: Holmes, Bray

Overview of this book

React Native is a game-changing approach to hybrid mobile development. Web developers can leverage their existing skills to write mobile applications in JavaScript that are truly native without using cross-compilation or web views. These applications have all of the advantages of those written in Objective-C or Java, combined with the rapid development cycle that JavaScript developers are accustomed to. Web developers who want to develop native mobile applications face a high barrier to entry, because they are forced to learn platform-specific languages and frameworks. Numerous hybrid technologies have tried to simplify this process, but have failed to achieve the performance and appearance that users expect. This book will show you all the advantages of true native development that React Native has without the steep learning curve, leveraging the knowledge you already have. We do this by getting you up and running quickly with a sample application. Next, we’ll introduce you to the fundamentals of creating components and explain how React Native works under the hood. Once you have established a solid foundation, you will dive headfirst into developing a real-world application from start to finish. Along the way, we will demonstrate how to create multiple screens and navigate between them,use layout and style native UI components, and access native APIs such as local storage and geolocation. Finally, we tackle the advanced topic of Native modules, which demonstrates that there are truly no limits to what you can do with React Native.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

React CSS

If you have any experience in writing CSS for a browser then you will feel comfortable with the styles in React Native. Although, instead of the browser's implementation of cascading styles, Facebook has developed a subset version of CSS in JavaScript. The benefit of this approach is that the designer can fully utilize features in JavaScript, such as variables and conditionals, which CSS does not support natively.

Style Sheet

Style Sheet is the React Native abstraction to declare styles using object notation. The components can use any style, so if you find that you are not able to get the right look then refer to the React Native documentation on that component in its styles section.

When inserting styles, it is common to include only those styles that you need for that specific component. It is similar to how JSX combines the JavaScript logic and markup into a single component; we are also going to define our styles in the same file.

To create a Style Sheet, use the Stylesheet...