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!

Data flow

In the last two chapters, we saw how to create single reusable components and how to compose them together effectively. Now, it is time to learn how to build a proper data flow for sharing data across multiple components in our application.

React enforces a very interesting pattern to make data go from the root to the leaves. This pattern is usually called unidirectional data flow, and we will look at it in detail in this section.

As the name suggests, in React, data flows in a single direction from the top to the bottom of the tree. This approach has many benefits because it simplifies the components' behavior and the relationship between components, making the code more predictable and maintainable.

Every component receives data from its parent in the form of props, and props cannot be modified. When the data is received, it can be transformed into new information...