Book Image

ReactJS by Example - Building Modern Web Applications with React

By : Vipul A M
Book Image

ReactJS by Example - Building Modern Web Applications with React

By: Vipul A M

Overview of this book

ReactJS is an open-source JavaScript library that brings the power of reactive programming to web applications and sites. It aims to address the challenges encountered in developing single-page applications, and is intended to help developers build large, easily scalable and changing web apps. Starting with a project on Open Library API, you will be introduced to React and JSX before moving on to learning about the life cycle of a React component. In the second project, building a multi-step wizard form, you will learn about composite dynamic components and perform DOM actions. You will also learn about building a fast search engine by exploring server-side rendering in the third project on a search engine application. Next, you will build a simple frontpage for an e-commerce app in the fourth project by using data models and React add-ons. In the final project you will develop a complete social media tracker by using the flux way of defining React apps and know about the best practices and use cases with the help of ES6 and redux. By the end of this book, you will not only have a good understanding of ReactJS but will also have built your very own responsive frontend applications from scratch.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
ReactJS by Example - Building Modern Web Applications with React
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

State versus props


"Shawn, it's important to understand the difference between props and state and where to use what." informed Mike.

"Props are immutable. They should not be updated by the component to which they are passed. They are are owned by the component which passes them to some other component. State is something internal and private to the component. State can and will change depending on the interactions with the outer world." said Mike.

"State should store as simple data as possible, such as whether an input checkbox is checked or not or a CSS class that hides or displays the component." Mike added.

"Another thing to make sure is to not duplicate props in state." said Mike.

var App = React.createClass({
  getInitialState: function() {
    return {
      changeSets: this.props.changeSets
    };
  }
});

"It is possible to set the state based on data passed in props. However, the parent component can update the props and send them again. In this case, the state will be muddled up with...