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

Summary

This chapter talked about how to fetch data on initial rendering and how to avoid the infinite loop when updating the state after fetching data. Throughout this chapter, we have used the Google Font API to fetch data on initial rendering with the class-based and functional component. We have also covered how to use custom hooks to share the common fetching functionality with components.

Firstly, we learned that the componentDidMount() life cycle method is the best place to fetch data upon initial rendering. Also, we learned how to use async/await with componentDidMount() and how to display the data using the map() method in the render() method.

Secondly, we used componentDidUpdate() when fetching data on updating components. We also established that updating state inside componentDidUpdate() will cause the infinite loop. To avoid this, we compared the previous prop with the current prop and updated the state only when those two prop values were different.

Thirdly...