Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By : Carlos Santana Roldán
Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

By: Carlos Santana Roldán

Overview of this book

React is an adaptable JavaScript library for building complex UIs from small, detached bits called components. This book is designed to take you through the most valuable design patterns in React, helping you learn how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations. You’ll get started by understanding the internals of React, in addition to covering Babel 7 and Create React App 2.0, which will help you write clean and maintainable code. To build on your skills, you will focus on concepts such as class components, stateless components, and pure components. You'll learn about new React features, such as the context API and React Hooks that will enable you to build components, which will be reusable across your applications. The book will then provide insights into the techniques of styling React components and optimizing them to make applications faster and more responsive. In the concluding chapters, you’ll discover ways to write tests more effectively and learn how to contribute to React and its ecosystem. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to tackle any developmental setbacks when working with React. You’ll be able to make your applications more flexible, efficient, and easy to maintain, thereby giving your workflow a boost when it comes to speed, without reducing quality.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Hello React!
4
Section 2: How React works
9
Section 3: Performance, Improvements and Production!

Reconciliation

Most of the time, React is fast enough by default and you do not need to do anything more to improve the performance of your application. React utilizes different techniques to optimize the rendering of the components on the screen.

When React has to display a component, it calls its render method and the render methods of its children recursively. The render method of a component returns a tree of React elements, which React uses to decide which DOM operations have to be done to update the UI.

Whenever a component state changes, React calls the render method on the nodes again, and it compares the result with the previous tree of React elements. The library is smart enough to figure out the minimum set of operations required to apply the expected changes on the screen. This process is called reconciliation, and it is managed transparently by React. Thanks to that...