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

Introducing React

While the example in the previous section is a complex problem, the good news is that with React, the solution isn't terribly complex.

Instead of thinking about each element your browser sees and displays for the user as separate from your HTML code and JavaScript code (and thus separate from the states that each exhibits at any given point in time), React allows you to think of all of the code as part of the same data structure, all intertwined and working together:

  • The component
  • The state
  • The display (or render)

This reduces a lot of the complexity and overhead while trying to amalgamate component state and component display with a mixture of CSS and JavaScript along the way. React represents a more elegant way to allow the developer to think holistically about what is on the browser and what the user is interacting with, and how that state changes along the way.

By itself, all of that is a great help to us as developers but React...