Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices

By : Michele Bertoli
Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices

By: Michele Bertoli

Overview of this book

Taking a complete journey through the most valuable design patterns in React, this book demonstrates how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations, whether that’s for new or already existing projects. It will help you to make your applications more flexible, perform better, and easier to maintain – giving your workflow a huge boost when it comes to speed without reducing quality. We’ll begin by understanding the internals of React before gradually moving on to writing clean and maintainable code. We’ll build components that are reusable across the application, structure applications, and create forms that actually work. Then we’ll style React components and optimize them to make applications faster and more responsive. Finally, we’ll write tests effectively and you’ll learn how to contribute to React and its ecosystem. By the end of the book, you’ll be saved from a lot of trial and error and developmental headaches, and you will be on the road to becoming a React expert.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
React Design Patterns and Best Practices
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Creating classes


We have seen in the first chapter how React uses elements to display the components on the screen.

Let's now look at the different ways in which we can define our components with React and the reasons why we should use one or other technique.

Again this book assumes that you've already played with React in a small/medium application which means that you must have created some components before.

You may have chosen one method according to the examples on the React website or by following the style of the boilerplate you used to scaffold the project.

Concepts such as props, state, and life cycle methods should be clear at this point, and we are not going to look at them in detail.

The createClass factory

Looking at the React documentation (at the time of writing), the first example we find shows us how to define components using React.createClass.

Let's start with a very simple snippet:

const Button = React.createClass({ 
  render() { 
    return <button /> 
...