Book Image

Designing React Hooks the Right Way

By : Fang Jin
Book Image

Designing React Hooks the Right Way

By: Fang Jin

Overview of this book

React hook creates a unique solution for using states in function components to orchestrate UI communication. They provide you with an easy interface to write custom data management solutions with low development and maintenance costs. Understanding how Hooks are designed enables you to use them more effectively, and this book helps you to do just that. This book starts with a custom-crafted solution to reveal why Hooks are needed in the first place. You will learn about the React engine and discover how each built-in Hook can manage a persistent value by hooking into it. You will walk through the design and implementation of each hook with code so that you gain a solid understanding. Finally, you'll get to grips with each Hook's pitfalls and find out how to effectively overcome them. By the end of this React book, you'll have gained the confidence to build and write Hooks for developing functional and efficient web applications at scale.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Adopting CSS-in-JS approach

When we build an application in React, at one point, we need to find a way to apply CSS styles to our code, right? If you have CSS experience in the past, one approach we're familiar with is to use CSS classes to style styles. Consider the following CSS snippet stored in a file with a .css extension:

h1 {
  color: red;
}

We can apply this style to a React element via a prop called className:

const Title = () => {
  return <h1 className="title">Hello</h1>
}

Note

class is a reserved keyword for JavaScript and therefore can't be used. Instead, React chooses to use a different word, className.

Though this old method continues to work, there's one issue about the uniqueness of the title class. CSS can be applied to all the title elements on the screen, but it can't skip an element inside a component that we don't want to be styled. From the CSS perspective, the title class...