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)

What is a Hook?

Now that we have revealed the stripped-down version of the React Hook infrastructure and crafted a function using it, let's give it a spin in a function component:

const Title = () => {
  const a = _useHook(0)
}

The preceding a variable is assigned a 0 number upon the mount, and then it serves as a state for the rest of the updates.

_useHook is technically a React hook function. Though it's not an officially supported one, and we crafted it here to demonstrate the infrastructure, it has everything about being a hook function. Let's take a close look at it.

Note

To distinguish the educational hook that we crafted from the officially supported hook, we prefixed the hook name with _, as in _useHook.

We’ll further explain the nature of a hook being a function as well as its calling order in the following section.

A hook is a function

A hook is a function that takes input arguments and returns a value, and it carries...