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

The Mount Lifecycle

The mount lifecycle is called twice: before and immediately after React renders the component into DOM. Note that mounting alone happens only once; there is no scope in a React world where you can remount a React component into the DOM. When we say that React renders to the DOM, it means that this is when React processes the JSX, converts it to HTML, and shows it on the browser.

Mounting is where a lot of the functionality will take place specific to initializing a component's state at the time of loading. Mounting happens when your app loads up for the first time, when you navigate to a particular component using something like React router, or it could be something like when you add a component to a page dynamically, like through conditional renders or loops. The first one of these functionalities is one you should be very comfortable with at this point: the constructor.

constructor()

We have used the contructor(props) method in previous exercises...