Book Image

React and React Native

By : Adam Boduch
Book Image

React and React Native

By: Adam Boduch

Overview of this book

para 1: Dive into the world of React and create powerful applications with responsive and streamlined UIs! With React best practices for both Android and iOS, this book demonstrates React and React Native in action, helping you to create intuitive and engaging applications. Para 2: React and React Native allow you to build desktop, mobile and native applications for all major platforms. Combined with Flux and Relay, you?ll be able to create powerful and feature-complete applications from just one code base. Para 3: Discover how to build desktop and mobile applications using Facebook?s innovative UI libraries. You?ll also learn how to craft composable UIs using React, and then apply these concepts to building Native UIs using React Native. Finally, find out how you can create React applications which run on all major platforms, and leverage Relay for feature-complete and data-driven applications. Para 4: What?s Inside ? Craft composable UIs using React & build Native UIs using React Native ? Create React applications for major platforms ? Access APIs ? Leverage Relay for data-driven web & native mobile applications
Table of Contents (34 chapters)
React and React Native
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Simplicity is good


React doesn't have many moving parts to learn about and understand. Internally, there's a lot going on, and we'll touch on these things here and there throughout the book. The advantage to having a small API to work with is that you can spend more time familiarizing yourself with it, experimenting with it, and so on. The opposite is true of large frameworks, where all your time is devoted to figuring out how everything works. The following diagram gives a rough idea of the APIs that we have to think about when programming with React:

React is divided into two major APIs. First, there's the React DOM. This is the API that's used to perform the actual rendering on a web page. Second, there's the React component API. These are the parts of the page that are actually rendered by React DOM. Within a React component, we have the following areas to think about:

  • Data: This is data that comes from somewhere (the component doesn't care where), and is rendered by the component

  • Lifecycle: These are methods that we implement that respond to changes in the lifecycle of the component. For example, the component is about to be rendered

  • Events: This is code that we write for responding to user interactions

  • JSX: This is the syntax of React components used to describe UI structures

Don't fixate on what these different areas of the React API represent just yet. The takeaway here is that React, by nature, is simple. Just look at how little there is to figure out! This means that we don't have to spend a ton of time going through API details here. Instead, once you pick up on the basics, we can spend more time on nuanced React usage patterns.