React Native helps web and mobile developers to build apps for iOS and Android apps that perform at the same level as any other natively developed app. The range of apps that can be built using this library is huge. From e-commerce to games, React Native is a good fit for any mobile project due to its flexibility and extendable nature. It has good performance, reuses React knowledge, has the ability to import npm packages, and uses the same codebase for iOS and Android. There's no doubt React Native is not only a good alternative to native development, but also a great way to introduce web developers to a mobile project. This book aims to give JavaScript and React developers a peek at how some of the most popular apps in the market could be built from scratch with React Native. We will build all the apps in iOS and Android, except for those cases where the apps only make sense on one of the platforms.
Chapter 1, Shopping List, shows how a groceries list can be built in React Native using simple navigation and introducing some of the most common native components.
Chapter 2, RSS Reader, teaches you how to create a news feed reader using RSS.
Chapter 3, Car Booking App, explains how some of the most popular car-sharing apps could have been developed using React Native.
Chapter 4, Image Sharing App, teaches you the fundamentals of how a social network based on image sharing can be created with React Native.
Chapter 5, Guitar Tuner, is one of the apps that require components not yet available in React Native. We will build one of these native components and use it from a React Native app.
Chapter 6, Messaging App, 1:1 messaging apps are the most popular apps in the stores. In this chapter, we will build a full-featured messaging app including push notifications and cloud-based storage.
Chapter 7, Game, is fun and shows you the fundamentals of how a 2D game can be developed using React Native.
Chapter 8, E-Commerce App, uses React Native to build one of the most requested types of app in the market: an e-commerce app to buy and sell products online.
Most of the apps built throughout this book will run on Android and iOS, so a computer running Linux, Windows, or OSX will be required, although we recommend any Apple computer (running OSX 10 or later) to run both mobile platforms at once, as some examples will require working on XCode, which is only installable on OSX.
Other pieces of software we will use in examples are:
- XCode
- Android Studio
- A React-ready IDE (such as Atom, VS Code, and SublimeText)
And of course, we will need React Native and React Native CLI installed (https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started.html).
This book is targeted at JavaScript developers trying to understand how different kinds of apps can be built using React Native. They will find a set of best practices and proven architectural strategies that can be applied to building any kind of app.
Although some basic concepts of React won't be explained in this book, no specific React skills are needed to follow along, since we won't dive deep into complex React patterns.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We have to create an src folder where we will store all our React code."
Also in big code blocks, when some pieces of code are not relevant or reviewed in a different place, they will be replaced by an ellipsis (...).
A block of code is set as follows:
/*** index.js ***/
import { AppRegistry } from 'react-native';
import App from './src/main';
AppRegistry.registerComponent('GroceriesList', () => App);Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
react-native run-iosNew terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The back button on the Add a product screen."
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