Book Image

React 17 Design Patterns and Best Practices - Third Edition

By : Carlos Santana Roldán
2 (1)
Book Image

React 17 Design Patterns and Best Practices - Third Edition

2 (1)
By: Carlos Santana Roldán

Overview of this book

Filled with useful React patterns that you can use in your projects straight away, this book will help you save time and build better web applications with ease. React 17 Design Patterns and Best Practices is a hands-on guide for those who want to take their coding skills to a new level. You’ll spend most of your time working your way through the principles of writing maintainable and clean code, but you’ll also gain a deeper insight into the inner workings of React. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll learn how to build components that are reusable across the application, how to structure applications, and create forms that actually work. Then you’ll build on your knowledge by exploring how to style React components and optimize them to make applications faster and more responsive. Once you’ve mastered the rest, you’ll learn how to write tests effectively and how to contribute to React and its ecosystem. By the end of this book, you'll be able to avoid the process of trial and error and developmental headaches. Instead, you’ll be able to use your new skills to efficiently build and deploy real-world React web applications you can be proud of.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Hello React!
4
How React Works
10
Performance, Improvements, and Production!
19
About Packt

Using indexes as a key

In Chapter 10, Improving the Performance of Your Applications, which talks about performance and the reconciler, we saw how we can help React figure out the shortest path to update the DOM by using the key prop.

The key property uniquely identifies an element in the DOM, and React uses it to check whether the element is new or whether it has to be updated when the component properties or state change.

Using keys is always a good idea and if you don't do it, React gives a warning in the console (in development mode). However, it is not simply a matter of using a key; sometimes, the value that we decide to use as a key can make a difference. In fact, using the wrong key can give us unexpected behaviors in some instances. In this section, we will see one of those instances.

Let's again create a List component, as shown here:

import { FC, useState } from 'react'

const List: FC = () => {

}

export default List

Then we define our state:

const [items...