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

In the previous chapters, while building our components, we have used lifecycle methods multiple times without knowing it. For example, we have used the constructor() and render() methods in every class component we have built so far. We did not call or overwrite these methods specifically but React has behind-the-scenes functionality for performing this.

In this chapter, we will talk a little bit about what that means and explore the different methods, where they fire off during building a component, mounting them onto the Document Object Model(DOM), rendering them, and then updating them beyond that. You can also implement events that need to occur when a component is removed from the DOM using the unmount lifecycle method.

It's worth noting, however, that you cannot overwrite or call lifecycle methods explicitly in functional components; only class-based components have this functionality. You cannot override them because, being functions, they lack the...