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

Initializing the state using props


In this section, we will see how initializing the state using props received from the parent is usually an anti-pattern. I have used the word usually because, as we will see, once we have it clear in our mind what the problems with this approach are, we might still decide to use it.

One of the best ways to learn something is by looking at the code, so we will start by creating a simple component with a + button to increment a counter.

The component is implemented using a class:

class Counter extends React.Component 

It has a constructor where we initialize the state using the count prop and we bind the event handler:

constructor(props) { 
  super(props) 
 
  this.state = { 
    count: props.count, 
  } 
 
  this.handleClick = this.handleClick.bind(this) 
} 

The implementation of the click handler is pretty straightforward: we just add 1 to the current count value and store the resulting value back into the state...