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!

Context API

The new and official Context API was introduced in React 16.3.0. Before, React offered an experimental API for context. Although it was a powerful tool, its use was discouraged because of inherent problems in the API.

React 16.3 introduces a new context API that is more efficient and supports both static type checking and deep updates.

The Context API implementation is really easy. First, you need to create your Context (using createContext) and your Provider, which is a React class component. Let's create a context for our List component to fetch the gists. This file needs to be called ListContext.jsx:

  // Dependencies
import React, { Component, createContext } from 'react';
import { element } from 'prop-types';

// Context
export const ListContext = createContext();

export class ListProvider extends Component {
static propTypes ...