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

Recap of React Refs Basics

Before we dive right into handling Refs, we should recap some basics regarding Refs and React in general. We will be refreshing our memory on the following topics:

  • Native versus custom React components
  • Encapsulation via props

This will support us in grasping the usage of Refs as a whole. Furthermore, this will help us in utilizing the knowledge acquired to solve problems related to DOM manipulations efficiently.

Native versus Custom React Components

As you might recall, there are two different types of JSX tags that we frequently write. These are the custom components that we entirely implement ourselves; for example, a specialized input field that has custom properties and is composed of other components. As a standard convention, we represent them as a capitalized JSX variable, as shown in the following code snippet:

// JSX custom Components
<MyCustomInput />
<SpecialButton />

The other type of components...