Book Image

The React Workshop

By : Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot
5 (1)
Book Image

The React Workshop

5 (1)
By: Brandon Richey, Ryan Yu, Endre Vegh, Theofanis Despoudis, Anton Punith, Florian Sloot

Overview of this book

Are you interested in how React takes command of the view layer for web and mobile apps and changes the data of large web applications without needing to reload the page? This workshop will help you learn how and show you how to develop and enhance web apps using the features of the React framework with interesting examples and exercises. The workshop starts by demonstrating how to create your first React project. You’ll tap into React’s popular feature JSX to develop templates and use DOM events to make your project interactive. Next, you’ll focus on the lifecycle of the React component and understand how components are created, mounted, unmounted, and destroyed. Later, you’ll create and customize components to understand the data flow in React and how props and state communicate between components. You’ll also use Formik to create forms in React to explore the concept of controlled and uncontrolled components and even play with React Router to navigate between React components. The chapters that follow will help you build an interesting image-search app to fetch data from the outside world and populate the data to the React app. Finally, you’ll understand what ref API is and how it is used to manipulate DOM in an imperative way. By the end of this React book, you’ll have the skills you need to set up and create web apps using React.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Preface

Problems before React

Web development is a trade that can sometimes be incredibly confusing and complex. The act of getting the buttons, pictures, and text that we see on a website is not always a simple endeavor.

Think about a web page with a little form to log into your account. You have at least two text boxes, usually for your username and your password, where you need to enter your details. You have a button or link that allows you to log in after the details have been entered, with maybe at least one extra little link in case you forget your password. You probably also have a logo for this site you are logging into, and maybe some sort of branding or otherwise compelling visual elements. Here is an example of a simple login page:

Figure 1.1: Login form

All of that doesn't just exist, though. A web developer needs to sit down and build each of these pieces and put them together in such a way so that the audience visiting that site can interact...