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

Hooks

In this section, we are going to introduce two of the popularly used React hooks: useState and useEffect. These are widely used and can solve most of our problems. The useState hook is used to initialize the state of a component and get access to a function that allows you to modify the state of that same component. The useEffect hook, on the other hand, is used when changes are made to the component, similar to the use case for componentDidMount or componentDidUpdate methods in class-based components.

Note

There are other types of hooks that come bundled with the React library. You can find a complete list of these at https://packt.live/3bCTh8d.

Let's dive right into these two particular hooks in more detail.

useState

useState is the first type of hook that we are going to use. It gives us all the functionality that this.state and this.setState provide for class-based components. When we call useState, it will return an array where the first item in the...