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

React is a UI library that helps us build single-page web and mobile applications. In single-page applications, the page is loaded only once. When the user interacts with the page, say, they click a button, the application will make a request to the server. When the page receives data from the server, it will only update the page partially without entirely reloading the page.

Since a single-page application has a lot of coding in one place, the code could get quite complex to manage. As we saw in the previous chapter, React allows us to split components into smaller pieces and helps in building reusable components with a consistent UI design.

Having reusable components means developers can use each component multiple times in their application as each component can be developed further separately and can contain its own business logic. It's much easier to test the individual smaller components as this will not bind any complex logic together.

While there...