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)

Summary

In this chapter, we first learned what a React ref is. We then went over how to access a DOM element by using a ref and went through the design of the useRef hook, and saw how to persist a value without triggering a UI update. We also gave useRef a test drive by walking through an input focus example. In the end, we went through how special it is by showing more examples of its use, including clicking outside of a menu, avoiding memory leaks, setting up a mule, and locating the current value.

In the next chapter, we will put all the hooks we have learned so far together and see how to finally create your custom hook, tailored to solve your own problems.