ReactJS is an open source JavaScript library that intends to bring aspects of reactive programming to web applications and sites. It aims to address the challenges encountered in developing single-page applications. React's core principles are declarative code, efficiency, flexibility, and improved developer experience.
What better way of learning a new technology than diving deep into it while working on something? This book will guide you with the help of different projects, each focusing on the specific features of React in your journey of mastering React. We will cover everything from JSX, add-ons, performance, and Redux.
Let the journey commence!
Chapter 1, Getting Started with React, covers the basics of ReactJS by building a simple app with static data. We will study top-level API of React and its basic building blocks.
Chapter 2, JSX in Depth, does a deep dive into JSX and how to use it with React. We will also look at a few gotchas that need to be considered while working with JSX.
Chapter 3, Data Flow and Life Cycle Events, focuses on data flow between React components and complete life cycle of a component.
Chapter 4, Composite Dynamic Components and Forms, shows how to build composite dynamic components using React with more focus on forms while building a form wizard application.
Chapter 5, Mixins and the DOM, covers mixins, refs, and how React interacts with DOM.
Chapter 6, React on the Server, uses React on the server side to render HTML and learn more about what server-side rendering brings to the table by building a search application based on Open Library Books API.
Chapter 7, React Addons, continues to use the search application and enhances it with various add-ons provided with React. We will study the use cases of these add-ons.
Chapter 8, Performance of React Apps, discusses everything about the performance of the React app by going deep into how React renders the content and helps in making our apps faster.
Chapter 9, React Router and Data Models, helps in building a Pinterest-style application and discusses routing using react-router. We will also discuss how various data models can be used with React, including Backbone models.
Chapter 10, Animation, focuses on making our Pinterest app more interactive with animations and how to use them effectively with React.
Chapter 11, React Tools, takes a step back and discusses various tools that we will use in our journey while working with React. We will study the tools such as Babel, ESLint, React dev tools, and Webpack.
Chapter 12, Flux, explains how to build a social media-tracker application while using the Flux architecture. We will discuss the need for the Flux architecture and what it brings to the table.
Chapter 13, Redux and React, covers using Redux—a popular state management library—to enhance the social media-tracker application further in order to use Redux-based state management.
You will need to have a modern web browser, such as Chrome or Firefox, to run the examples from the book. You will also need to have Node.js—https://nodejs.org/en/—installed with the npm package manager set up. Additional setup instructions can be found at https://github.com/bigbinary/reactjs-by-example.
If you are a web developer and wish to learn ReactJS from scratch, then this book is tailor-made for you. Good understanding of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS is expected.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Notice, how we are using this.props.headings to access the passed information about headings."
A block of code is set as follows:
return <div>
<h1>Recent Changes</h1>
<table>
….
</table>
</div>
…When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
TestUtils.Simulate.click(submitButton);
expect(app.state.searching).toEqual(true);
expect(app.state.searchCompleted).toEqual(false);
let spinner = TestUtils.findRenderedComponentWithType(app, Spinner);
expect(spinner).toBeTruthy();
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Listening at localhost:9000 Hash: 8ec0d12965567260413b Version: webpack 1.9.11 Time: 1639ms
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Did you notice the Auto-run JS option?"
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