Book Image

React 16 Tooling

By : Adam Boduch, Christopher Pitt
Book Image

React 16 Tooling

By: Adam Boduch, Christopher Pitt

Overview of this book

React 16 Tooling covers the most important tools, utilities, and libraries that every React developer needs to know — in detail. As React has grown, the amazing toolset around it has also grown, adding features and enhancing the development workflow. Each of these essential tools is presented in a practical manner and in a logical order mirroring the development workflow. These tools will make your development life simpler and happier, enabling you to create better and more performant apps. Adam starts with a hand-picked selection of the best tools for the React 16 ecosystem. For starters, there’s the create-react-app utility that’s officially supported by the React team. Not only does this tool bootstrap your React project for you, it also provides a consistent and stable framework to build upon. The premise is that when you don’t have to think about meta development work, more focus goes into the product itself. Other React tools follow this same approach to automating and improving your development life. Jest makes unit testing quicker. Flow makes catching errors easier. Docker containers make deployment in a stack simpler. Storybook makes developing components straightforward. ESLint makes writing standardized code faster. The React DevTools plugin makes debugging a cinch. React 16 Tooling clears away the barriers so you can focus on developing the good parts. In this book, we’ll look at each of these powerful tools in detail, showing you how to build the perfect React ecosystem to develop your apps within.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
2
Efficiently Bootstrapping React Applications with Create React App
Index

What does type-safety solve?


Type-safety is no silver bullet. For example, I'm perfectly capable of writing a type-safe application that's riddled with bugs. It's the kind of bugs that just sort of stop happening after a type-checker is introduced that are interesting. So what types of things can you expect after introducing a tool like Flow? I'll share three factors that I've experienced while learning Flow. The Type System section in the Flow docs goes into much more detail on this topic, available at https://flow.org/en/docs/lang/.

Replacing guesswork with assurance

One of the nice features of a dynamically-typed language like JavaScript is that you can write code without having to think about types. Types are good and they do solve a lot of problems—the point I'm trying to make, believe it or not—but sometimes you need to be able to just write code without having to formally validate for correctness. In other words, sometimes guesswork is exactly what you need.

If I'm writing a function...