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

useState Hook: A Closer Look

As we have seen in the previous chapter, useState is the way to provide state to our functional components, similar to this.state and setState() in a class-based component.

As we already know, the state is always an object in classes. However, in Hooks, the state can be of any datatype. We used the useState hook in the previous chapter with primitive values such as number and Boolean. This introduces several complications later on when we rely on datatypes that are modified in a different way to primitive types, such as arrays or objects.

The first complication arises when we use setter functions with arrays, so let's explore that first.

Setter Functions on Arrays

We have already become comfortable with using setter functions when using the useState hook in the previous chapter. As a refresher, let's return to the setter function for a while; the second argument of the useState array. We can pass a value directly to the setter...