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

Creating a React Component

Now that we have a strong grasp of JSX and React, we have everything that we need to be able to start building out our own React components. We now need to cover the work of actually writing a component. When creating new components in React, you have a few options that are commonly used, and they each serve slightly different purposes.

Sometimes you need a small, lightweight declaration of a component to just display something simply and easily where you are not worried about a lot of state modification or user interaction. The easiest way to declare a component in React is with functional syntax.

Preparing Our Code to Start Writing Our Component

Remember that when creating a new project with create-react-app, we start off with a bunch of starter components and a lot of extra code pre-written for us. The best course for us is to wipe out the starter Create React App code and begin rewriting it with our own component. We will start off...