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

Differences between Class and Function Components

So far, we have seen how we can define a class component by extending React.Component, and a function component that can use the power of ES6 to define a concise body with an implicit return statement to create a simple component.

Apart from sheer size, though, there are also other differences between the two that we need to consider while deciding to create a component using either of the following methods. Let's discuss the pointers one by one.

Syntax

Let's consider a simple component that receives a name as a value from a parent component and shows a hello message.

The following code is from the Hello component that is defined as a class component:

import React, { Component } from "react";
export class Hello extends Component {
  render() {
    return <h1>Hello {this.props.name}!</h1>;
  }
}

The same component can be written as a functional...