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 chapter, we learned about the functionalities of React Refs, and we discussed a few scenarios where refs could be used. In this chapter, we will continue to explore other such practical use cases and look at situations when we might want to use refs. A few such scenarios include binding external libraries to React, triggering animations, handling DOM actions, such as focusing on a text field, text selection, and media playback. Imagine a scenario where you have designed a React application that requires the integration of the functionalities of the Google Maps library. Refs in React make the process easier since we can access the DOM nodes of this library with the help of Refs. Since Refs are often best used in co-operation with other React utilities, we will take a brief look at a couple of such utilities, too, in particular, cloneElement and createPortal. During this chapter, we will get to know how to make use of Refs in our code and solve some problems...