Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

Book Image

React Design Patterns and Best Practices - Second Edition

Overview of this book

React is an adaptable JavaScript library for building complex UIs from small, detached bits called components. This book is designed to take you through the most valuable design patterns in React, helping you learn how to apply design patterns and best practices in real-life situations. You’ll get started by understanding the internals of React, in addition to covering Babel 7 and Create React App 2.0, which will help you write clean and maintainable code. To build on your skills, you will focus on concepts such as class components, stateless components, and pure components. You'll learn about new React features, such as the context API and React Hooks that will enable you to build components, which will be reusable across your applications. The book will then provide insights into the techniques of styling React components and optimizing them to make applications faster and more responsive. In the concluding chapters, you’ll discover ways to write tests more effectively and learn how to contribute to React and its ecosystem. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to tackle any developmental setbacks when working with React. You’ll be able to make your applications more flexible, efficient, and easy to maintain, thereby giving your workflow a boost when it comes to speed, without reducing quality.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Hello React!
4
Section 2: How React works
9
Section 3: Performance, Improvements and Production!

CSS in JavaScript

In the community, everyone agrees that a revolution took place in the styling of React components in November 2014, when Christopher Chedeau gave a talk at the NationJS conference.

Also known as vjeux on the internet, Christopher works at Facebook and contributes to React. In his talk, he went through all the problems related to CSS on the scale that they were facing them at Facebook.

It is worth understanding all of them because some are pretty common and they will help us introduce concepts such as inline styles and locally scoped class names.

The following is the list of issues with CSS, basically problems with CSS at scale:

  • Global Namespace
  • Dependencies
  • Dead Code Elimination
  • Minification
  • Sharing Constants
  • Non-deterministic Resoulution
  • Isolation

The first well-known problem of CSS is that all the selectors are global. No matter how we organize our styles...