Book Image

Designing React Hooks the Right Way

By : Fang Jin
Book Image

Designing React Hooks the Right Way

By: Fang Jin

Overview of this book

React hook creates a unique solution for using states in function components to orchestrate UI communication. They provide you with an easy interface to write custom data management solutions with low development and maintenance costs. Understanding how Hooks are designed enables you to use them more effectively, and this book helps you to do just that. This book starts with a custom-crafted solution to reveal why Hooks are needed in the first place. You will learn about the React engine and discover how each built-in Hook can manage a persistent value by hooking into it. You will walk through the design and implementation of each hook with code so that you gain a solid understanding. Finally, you'll get to grips with each Hook's pitfalls and find out how to effectively overcome them. By the end of this React book, you'll have gained the confidence to build and write Hooks for developing functional and efficient web applications at scale.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Going from HTML to JSX

One barrier for a developer adopting React, especially if they are used to working with other web technologies, is that HTML isn't imported into the project anymore. There's not a file with a .html extension, except the entry index.html file, which most of the time only has one line of HTML inside, like so:

<div id="root">loading...</div>

But that's it. If there was a project manager that liked to review HTML or even work on it, they can't do that anymore. This missing HTML file could be one of the reasons why teams are hesitant to adopt React.

However, HTML has a similar problem to CSS. They don't have scopes that we have in programming languages. Even worse, a piece of HTML, once written, is almost turned into DOM elements instantly. So, a component-based system has to come up with a way to add a layer in between.

How did React solve this problem? It chose to take the HTML in – no surprise. But...