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!

JSX

In the previous chapter, we saw how React changes the concept of separation of concerns, moving the boundaries inside components. We also learned how React uses the elements returned by the components to display the UI on the screen.

Let's now look at how we can declare our elements inside our components.

React provides two ways to define our elements. The first one is by using JavaScript functions, and the second one is by using JSX, an optional XML-like syntax. Here is the examples section of the official React.js website (https://reactjs.org/#examples):

To begin with, JSX is one of the main reasons why people fail to approach React, because looking at the examples on the home page and seeing JavaScript mixed with HTML for the first time seems strange to most of us.

As soon as we get used to it, we realize that it is very convenient, precisely because it is similar...