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

Introduction

In the previous chapters, we learned about the various methods we can use to fetch data from external APIs and how to include that data inside your React application. This process required you to send XMLHttpRequest(XHR) requests over the network, take the result, and store it in your component.

A web page is often composed of more than just a React app; for example, an application can be embedded in a website where there are various elements in a web page (including our React app) all working together, like different form elements or HTML components. With all these elements that live outside your React components, you might think: could we access these other elements that are not controlled by the React application itself?

This question leads to the following section. We actually can control these elements "living outside" of a React application through References(Refs).