Book Image

The React Workshop

By : Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot
5 (1)
Book Image

The React Workshop

5 (1)
By: Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot

Overview of this book

Are you interested in how React takes command of the view layer for web and mobile apps and changes the data of large web applications without needing to reload the page? This workshop will help you learn how and show you how to develop and enhance web apps using the features of the React framework with interesting examples and exercises. The workshop starts by demonstrating how to create your first React project. You’ll tap into React’s popular feature JSX to develop templates and use DOM events to make your project interactive. Next, you’ll focus on the lifecycle of the React component and understand how components are created, mounted, unmounted, and destroyed. Later, you’ll create and customize components to understand the data flow in React and how props and state communicate between components. You’ll also use Formik to create forms in React to explore the concept of controlled and uncontrolled components and even play with React Router to navigate between React components. The chapters that follow will help you build an interesting image-search app to fetch data from the outside world and populate the data to the React app. Finally, you’ll understand what ref API is and how it is used to manipulate DOM in an imperative way. By the end of this React book, you’ll have the skills you need to set up and create web apps using React.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Preface

Introduction

We have seen in the previous chapter how Hooks, as compared to render props, can simplify a React app. The methodical approach of Hooks helps in creating easy-to-maintain and easily composable components, while keeping the React tree intact.

In this chapter, we are going to learn about state management in the functional components. The two most commonly used hooks that help us in making these components stateful are useState and useReducer. Over the course of this chapter, we will explore the trade-offs between the two and when to use which.

Since functional components cannot have life cycle methods to manage state, we had a discussion in the previous chapter about how the useEffect hook can perform identical functions, but without the risk of needing to group behavior together due to where it happens in the life cycle of the component. This has many advantages. For example, we can create separate and dedicated useEffect hooks to write to databases, to manipulate...