This chapter describes the basics of React programming. We will cover the skills that are needed to create basic functionalities for the React frontend. In JavaScript, we use the ES6 syntax because it provides many features that make coding cleaner.
In this chapter, we will look at the following:
In this book, we are using the Windows operating system, but all tools are available for Linux and macOS as well.
According to Facebook, React is a JavaScript library for user interfaces. Since version 15, React has been developed under the MIT license. React is component-based and the components are independent and reusable. The components are basic building blocks of React. When you start to develop a user interface with React, it is good to start by creating a mock interfaces. That way, it is easy to identify what kind of components you have to create and how they interact.
From the following diagram of the mock, we can see how the user interface can be split into components. In this case, there will be an application root component, a search bar component, a table component, and a table row component:
The components can then be arranged in the following tree hierarchy. The important thing to understand with React is that the dataflow is going...
In this chapter, we started to discover React, which we are going to use to build our frontend. Before starting to develop with React, we covered the basics, such as the React component, JSX, props, and state. In our frontend development, we are using ES6, which makes our code cleaner. We went through the features that we need for further development. We also learned how to handle forms and events with React.
Packt has other great resources for learning about React:
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