Learning React

In this book, we take you on a fun, hands-on and pragmatic journey to master React from a web development point of view. You'll start building React apps within minutes. Every section is written in a bite-sized manner and straight to the point as I don't want to waste your time (and most certainly mine) on the content you don't need. In the end, you will have what it takes to develop a real-life app.Facebook's React has changed the way we think about web applications and user interface development. Due to its design, you can use it beyond web. A feature known as the Virtual DOM enables this.In this chapter we'll go through some of the basic ideas behind the library so you understand React a little better before moving on.What is React?React is a JavaScript library that forces you to think in terms of components. This model of thinking fits user interfaces well. Depending on your background it might feel alien at first. You will have to think very carefully about the concept of state and where it belongs.Because state management is a difficult problem, a variety of solutions have appeared. In this book, we'll start by managing state ourselves and then push it to a Flux implementation known as Alt. There are also implementations available for several other alternatives, such as Redux, MobX, and Cerebral.React is pragmatic in the sense that it contains a set of escape hatches. If the React model doesn't work for you, it is still possible to revert back to something lower level. For instance, there are hooks that can be used to wrap older logic that relies on the DOM. This breaks the abstraction and ties your code to a specific environment, but sometimes that's the pragmatic thing to do.One of the fundamental problems of programming is how to deal with state. Suppose you are developing a user interface and want to show the same data in multiple places. How do you make sure the data is consistent?Historically we have mixed the concerns of the DOM and state and tried to manage it there. React solves this problem in a different way. It introduced the concept of the Virtual DOM to the masses.Virtual DOM exists on top of the actual DOM, or some other render target. It solves the state manipulation problem in its own way. Whenever changes are made to it, it figures out the best way to batch the changes to the underlying DOM structure. It is able to propagate changes across its virtual tree as in the image above.Virtual DOM PerformanceHandling the DOM manipulation this way can lead to increased performance. Manipulating the DOM by hand tends to be inefficient and is hard to optimize. By leaving the problem of DOM manipulation to a good implementation, you can save a lot of time and effort.React allows you to tune performance further by implementing hooks to adjust the way the virtual tree is updated. Though this is often an optional step.The biggest cost of Virtual DOM is that the implementation makes React quite big. You can expect the bundle sizes of small applications to be around 150-200 kB minified, React included. gzipping will help, but it's still big.

If you want to learn how to build efficient React applications, this is your book. Ideal for web developers and software engineers who understand how JavaScript, CSS, and HTML work in the browser, this updated edition provides best practices and patterns for writing modern React code. No prior knowledge of React or functional JavaScript is necessary. With their learning road map, authors Alex Banks and Eve Porcello show you how to create UIs that can deftly display changes without page reloads on large-scale, data-driven websites. You’ll also discover how to work with functional programming and the latest ECMAScript features. Once you learn how to build React components with this hands-on guide, you’ll understand just how useful React can be in your organization. Understand key functional programming concepts with JavaScriptLook under the hood to learn how React runs in the browserCreate application presentation layers with React componentsManage data and reduce the time you spend debugging applicationsIncorporate React Hooks to manage state and fetch dataUse a routing solution for single-page application featuresLearn how to structure React applications with servers in mind

Use React and React Native to build applications for desktop browsers, mobile browsers, and even as native mobile apps About This Book Build React and React Native applications using familiar component concepts Dive deep into each platform, from routing in React to creating native mobile applications that can run offline Use Facebook's Relay, React and GraphQL technologies, to create a unified architecture that powers both web and native applications Who This Book Is For This book is written for any JavaScript developer—beginner or expert—who wants to start learning how to put both of Facebook's UI libraries to work. No knowledge of React is needed, though a working knowledge of ES2015 will help you follow along better. What You Will Learn Craft reusable React components Control navigation using the React Router to help keep your UI in sync with URLs Build isomorphic web applications using Node.js Use the Flexbox layout model to create responsive mobile designs Leverage the native APIs of Android and iOS to build engaging applications with React Native Respond to gestures in a way that's intuitive for the user Use Relay to build a unified data architecture for your React UIs In Detail React and React Native allow you to build cross-platform desktop and mobile applications using Facebook's innovative UI libraries. Combined with the Flux data architecture and Relay, you can now create powerful and feature-complete applications from just one code base! This book is split into three parts. The first part shows you how to start crafting composable UIs using React, from rendering with JSX and creating reusable components through to routing and creating isomorphic applications that run on Node. We then move on to showing you how to take the concepts of React and apply them to building Native UIs using React Native. You'll find out how to build responsive and streamlined UIs that can properly handle user interactions in a mobile environment. You'll also learn how to access device-specific APIs such as the geolocation API, and how to handle offline development with React Native. Finally, we'll tie all of these skills together and shows you how you can create React applications that run on every major platform. As well as understanding application state in depth, you'll learn how to leverage Relay to make feature-complete, data-driven web and native mobile applications. Style and approach Split into three major sections to help organize your learning, this hands-on, code-first book will help you get up to speed with React and React Native—the UI framework that powers Netflix, Yahoo, and Facebook.

Learning React A hands-on guide to building web applications using React and Redux As far as new web frameworks and libraries go, React is quite the runaway success. It not only deals with the most common problems developers face when building complex apps, it throws in a few additional tricks that make building the visuals for such apps much, much easier. What React isn’t, though, is beginner-friendly and approachable. Until now. In Learning React, author Kirupa Chinnathambi brings his fresh, clear, and very personable writing style to help web developers new to React understand its fundamentals and how to use it to build really performant (and awesome) apps. The only book on the market that helps you get your first React app up and running in just minutes, Learning Reactis chock-full of colorful illustrations to help you visualize difficult concepts and practical step-by-step examples to show you how to apply what you learn. Build your first React app Create components to define parts of your UI Combine components into other components to build more complex UIs Use JSX to specify visuals without writing full-fledged JavaScript Deal with maintaining state Work with React’s way of styling content Make sense of the mysterious component lifecycle Build multi-page apps using routing and views Optimize your React workflow using tools such as Node, Babel, webpack, and others Use Redux to make managing your app data and state easy Contents at a Glance 1 Introducing React 2 Building Your First React App 3 Components in React 4 Styling in React 5 Creating Complex Components 6 Transferring Properties 7 Meet JSX... Again! 8 Dealing with State in React 9 Going from Data to UI in React 10 Events in React 11 The Component Lifecycle 12 Accessing DOM Elements in React 13 Setting Up Your React Dev Environment 14 Working with External Data in React 15 Building an Awesome Todo List App in React 16 Creating a Sliding Menu in React 17 Avoiding Unnecessary Renders in React 18 Creating a Single-Page App in React Using React Router 19 Introduction to Redux 20 Using Redux with React

If you want to learn how to build efficient user interfaces with React, this is your book. Authors Alex Banks and Eve Porcello show you how to create UIs with this small JavaScript library that can deftly display data changes on large-scale, data-driven websites without page reloads. Along the way, you’ll learn how to work with functional programming and the latest ECMAScript features. Developed by Facebook, and used by companies including Netflix, Walmart, and The New York Times for large parts of their web interfaces, React is quickly growing in use. By learning how to build React components with this hands-on guide, you’ll fully understand how useful React can be in your organization. Learn key functional programming concepts with JavaScript Peek under the hood to understand how React runs in the browser Create application presentation layers by mounting and composing React components Use component trees to manage data and reduce the time you spend debugging applications Explore React’s component lifecycle and use it to load data and improve UI performance Use a routing solution for browser history, bookmarks, and other features of single-page applications Learn how to structure React applications with servers in mind

Get a practical introduction to React Native, the JavaScript framework for writing and deploying fully featured mobile apps that render natively. The second edition of this hands-on guide shows you how to build applications that target iOS, Android, and other mobile platforms instead of browsers—apps that can access platform features such as the camera, user location, and local storage. Through code examples and step-by-step instructions, web developers and frontend engineers familiar with React will learn how to build and style interfaces, use mobile components, and debug and deploy apps. You’ll learn how to extend React Native using third-party libraries or your own Java and Objective-C libraries. Understand how React Native works under the hood with native UI components Examine how React Native’s mobile-based components compare to basic HTML elements Create and style your own React Native components and applications Take advantage of platform-specific APIs, as well as modules from the framework’s community Incorporate platform-specific components into cross-platform apps Learn common pitfalls of React Native development, and tools for dealing with them Combine a large application’s many screens into a cohesive UX Handle state management in a large app with the Redux library

My fourth web development book is simply called React.js Book. It will walk you step by step through the process of setting up a development environment and learning Reactive programming from start to finish. React is a library unlike any other I have worked with. Unlike jQuery where you had to learn a number of methods that do very specific things, it's largely inspired by a programming methodology for creating fast web applications.In addition you will be expected to know or at least be briefly familiar with prerequisite knowledge of other web development tools such as Node.js, NPM, Babel, JSX and WebPack. These are not required elements of programming with React, but without them things would be tough.As of 2017, Reactive programming is an alternative way of thinking about web applications. It provides software patterns that make your web app extremely responsive to user input and generally feel faster to the end-user (people who are using your application.) The Virtual DOM alone is enough of a reason to switch to React. Programming with React library, is a lot more than just learning about and using React objects, components, states, props and methods. It requires previous experience with JavaScript and at times assumes knowledge of software principles not inherent to React library itself.This book is not a list of object names, methods and functions with side explanations of what they do. Rather, it deals with the said principles involved in React programming thought up by the creators of React library. Principles that are usually understood by professional web developers and software engineers.For all these reasons stated above, this book will gradually walk you through the process of becoming familiar with React library, starting from basic concepts. Gradually, we will move toward more advanced subjects. So, prepare to be educated

Create large-scale web applications with code that is extensible and easy to understand using React Hooks Key FeaturesExplore effective strategies for migrating your state management from Redux and MobX to React HooksIntegrate Hooks with React features such as Context and Suspense to add advanced functionality to your web appsCreate complex applications by combining multiple hooksBook Description React Hooks revolutionize how you manage state and effects in your web applications. They enable you to build simple and concise React.js applications, along with helping you avoid using wrapper components in your applications, making it easy to refactor code. This React book starts by introducing you to React Hooks. You will then get to grips with building a complex UI in React while keeping the code simple and extensible. Next, you will quickly move on to building your first applications with React Hooks. In the next few chapters, the book delves into various Hooks, including the State and Effect Hooks. After covering State Hooks and understanding how to use them, you will focus on the capabilities of Effect Hooks for adding advanced functionality to React apps. You will later explore the Suspense and Context APIs and how they can be used with Hooks. Toward the concluding chapters, you will learn how to integrate Redux and MobX with React Hooks. Finally, the book will help you develop the skill of migrating your existing React class components, and Redux and MobX web applications to Hooks. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed in building your own custom Hooks and effectively refactoring your React applications. What you will learnUnderstand the fundamentals of React Hooks and how they modernize state management in React appsBuild your own custom Hooks and learn how to test themUse community Hooks for implementing responsive design and moreLearn the limitations of Hooks and what you should and shouldn’t use them forGet to grips with implementing React context using HooksRefactor your React-based web application, replacing existing React class components with HooksUse state management solutions such as Redux and MobX with React HooksWho this book is for This book is for React developers who want to learn how to build applications with Hooks. Developers who are looking to migrate to React for its advanced feature set and capabilities will also find the book useful.