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 to Formik

Formik is one of those libraries that came at just the right time to resolve a long-standing issue: how we handle really complex forms in React. Complex forms can include multiple embedded forms, dynamic fields and validation, or handling asynchronous checks with the backend. Prior to Formik, there were numerous options available, for example, using Redux-Form or React-Redux-Form, which basically stored the form state in a Redux store. That worked for a while, but complexity and peculiar bugs started to come in. Having to fix a gigantic form that was working once upon a time but now is not is something that we should all be wary of as it can happen all the time. For example, when we have a form where the validation happens in different stages and the outcome of each step depends on how the previous steps validate, it becomes difficult to find even the smallest bugs. And testing this logic can become even trickier because you would need to cover all the scenarios...