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)

Accessing DOM elements

Before a modern UI framework is introduced, to make a change to the screen, we work directly with a DOM element:

<body>
  <h1 id="title"></h1>
</body>
<script>
  const el = document.getElementById('#title')
  el.textContent = "Hello World"
</script>

The preceding HTML file defines an h1 element tagged with a specific id value. So we can use the id value to find the el element and make a change to its textContent. This is how a DOM element gets updated:

Figure 8.1 – HTML displaying the Hello World title

With React, we can achieve the preceding functionality by wrapping elements in a component, such as a function component:

const Title = () => {
  const [title, setTitle] = useState("")
  useEffect(() => { setTitle("Hello World") }, [])
  return <h1>{title}</h1&gt...