Book Image

React 18 Design Patterns and Best Practices - Fourth Edition

By : Carlos Santana Roldán
4.2 (6)
Book Image

React 18 Design Patterns and Best Practices - Fourth Edition

4.2 (6)
By: Carlos Santana Roldán

Overview of this book

React helps you work smarter, not harder — but to reap the benefits of this popular JavaScript library and its components, you need a straightforward guide that will teach you how to make the most of it. React 18 Design Patterns and Best Practices will help you use React effectively to make your applications more flexible, easier to maintain, and improve their performance, while giving your workflow a huge boost. With a better organization of topics and knowledge about best practices added to your developer toolbox, the updated fourth edition ensures an enhanced learning experience. The book is split into three parts; the first will teach you the fundamentals of React patterns, the second will dive into how React works, and the third will focus on real-world applications. All the code samples are updated to the latest version of React and you’ll also find plenty of new additions that explore React 18 and Node 19’s newest features, alongside MonoRepo Architecture and a dedicated chapter on TypeScript. By the end of this book, you'll be able to efficiently build and deploy real-world React web applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
18
Other Books You May Enjoy
19
Index

Exploring refs

One of the reasons people love React is that it is declarative. Being declarative means that you just describe what you want to be displayed on the screen at any point in time and React takes care of the communications with the browser. This feature makes React very easy to reason about and very powerful at the same time.

However, there might be some cases where you need to access the underlying DOM nodes to perform some imperative operations. This should be avoided because, in most cases, there is a more React-compliant solution to achieve the same result, but it is important to know that we have the option to do it and to know how it works so that we can make the right decision.

Suppose we want to create a simple form with an input element and a button, and we want it to behave in such a way that when the button is clicked, the input field gets focused. What we want to do is call the focus method on the input node, the actual DOM instance of the input, inside...