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)

Understanding useEffect design

React provides a useEffect hook to set up a callback to be invoked after an update:

const Title = () => {
  useEffect(() => {
    window.title = "Hello World"
    return () => {
      window.title = "Notitle"
    }
  }, [])
}

The useEffect function takes a callback function called create as its first input argument to define the effect. In the preceding example, the effect sets the window.title to be Hello World when the component is mounted.

A create function can return a function called destroy to perform the cleanup. The interesting thing here is that the destroy function is provided by the create function as a return value. In the preceding example, the cleanup reverts the window.title object back to NoTitle when it is unmounted.

The second parameter in the useEffect argument list is a dependency array...