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!

React DevTools

When testing in the console is not enough, and we want to inspect our application while it is running inside the browser, we can use the React Developer Tools.

You can install them as a Chrome extension at the following URL: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/react-developer-tools/fmkadmapgofadopljbjfkapdkoienihi?hl=en.

The installation adds a tab to the Chrome DevTools called React, where you can inspect the rendered tree of components and check which properties they have received and what their state is at a particular point in time.

Props and states can be read, and they can be changed in real time to trigger updates in the UI and see the results straightaway.

This is a must-have tool, and in the most recent versions it has a new feature that can be enabled by ticking the Trace React Updates checkbox.

When this functionality is enabled, we can use our...