Preface

Building frontend applications is challenging, especially when constructing large ones, and the difficulty escalates without proper guidance. Unfortunately, many React-based applications fall into this scenario due to the library’s UI-centric nature, leaving developers to navigate the other complexities of frontend development on their own. There are numerous other considerations such as asynchronous network requests, accessibility, performance, and state management, to name a few. These factors contribute to the complexity of frontend applications. As the scale of the application grows, maintaining the code becomes an arduous task. Adding new features requires considerably more time than it first appears, and identifying defects (and then fixing them) is equally challenging, if not more so.

However, these challenges are surmountable. We can learn to identify common anti-patterns that cause problems, then employ established patterns, design principles, and practices to address and rectify these issues. History teaches us that solutions derived in one field often find relevance in others, especially when it comes to fundamental design principles such as the Single Responsibility Principle, the Dependency Inversion Principle, and Don’t Repeat Yourself. These principles guided the construction of UNIX systems back in the 1970s and Java Swing applications in the 1990s, and they remain valid today. They will undoubtedly continue to be pertinent for future frameworks and libraries.

This book seeks to delve into these problems and examine how established patterns and practices can mitigate the challenges of building large applications. We’ll see how design principles and design patterns can simplify the design, making the code easier to understand, modify, and maintain in the long run. Through this exploration, readers will gain a deeper understanding of how to navigate the multifaceted world of frontend development with React, ensuring their applications are both robust and maintainable.