Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Carlos Santana Roldán
Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Carlos Santana Roldán

Overview of this book

React is an adaptable JavaScript library for building complex UIs from small, detached bits called components. This book is designed to take you through the most valuable design patterns in React, helping you learn how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations. You’ll get started by understanding the internals of React, in addition to covering Babel 7 and Create React App 2.0, which will help you write clean and maintainable code. To build on your skills, you will focus on concepts such as class components, stateless components, and pure components. You'll learn about new React features, such as the context API and React Hooks that will enable you to build components, which will be reusable across your applications. The book will then provide insights into the techniques of styling React components and optimizing them to make applications faster and more responsive. In the concluding chapters, you’ll discover ways to write tests more effectively and learn how to contribute to React and its ecosystem. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to tackle any developmental setbacks when working with React. You’ll be able to make your applications more flexible, efficient, and easy to maintain, thereby giving your workflow a boost when it comes to speed, without reducing quality.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Hello React!
4
Section 2: How React works
9
Section 3: Performance, Improvements and Production!

A basic example

We will now create a very simple server-side application to look at the steps that are needed to build a basic Universal setup.

It is going to be a minimal and simple setup on purpose because the goal here is to show how SSR works rather than providing a comprehensive solution or a boilerplate, even though you could use the example application as a starting point for a real-world application.

This section assumes that all the concepts regarding JavaScript build tools, such as webpack and its loaders, are clear, and it requires a little bit of knowledge of Node.js. As a JavaScript developer, it should be easy for you to follow this section, even if you have never seen a Node.js application before.

The application will consist of two parts:

  • The server side, where we will use Express to create a basic web server and serve an HTML page with the server-side rendered...