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!

Proper Data Fetching

The goal of this chapter is to show the different data fetching patterns that we can put in place in a React application. To find the best strategy, we have to understand how the data flows within a tree of components in React.

It is important to know how the parent can communicate with its children and vice versa. It is also crucial to understand how unconnected siblings can share their data. We will look at some real-world examples of data fetching, and transform a base component into a well-structured one using HoCs.

Finally, we will see how existing libraries such as react-refetch. can save us a lot of time by providing the core data fetching functionalities we need.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • The unidirectional data flow of React and how it can make our applications easier to reason about
  • How a child can communicate with its...