React Design Patterns and Best Practices

4.5 (8)

Buy this Book

React Design Patterns and Best Practices

4.5 (8)

Buy this Book

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.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

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Free Chapter

Section 1: Hello React!

Taking Your First Steps with React

Declarative programming

React elements

Unlearning everything

Common misconceptions

Summary

Clean Up Your Code

JSX

Code style

The basics of functional programming

Summary

Section 2: How React works

Creating Truly Reusable Components

Creating classes

The state

React hooks

Prop types

Reusable components

Fragments

Summary

Compose All the Things

Communication between components

The container and presentational pattern

Mixins

Higher order components

Recompose

FunctionAsChild

Summary

Proper Data Fetching

Data flow

Data fetching

React-refetch

Context API

Summary

Write Code for the Browser

Forms

Handling events

Refs

Animations

Scalable Vector Graphics

Summary

Section 3: Performance, Improvements and Production!

Make Your Components Look Beautiful

CSS in JavaScript

Inline styles

Radium

CSS modules

Styled components

Summary

Server-Side Rendering for Fun and Profit

Universal applications

Reasons to implement SSR

A basic example

A data fetching example

Next.js

Summary

Improve the Performance of Your Applications

Reconciliation

Keys

Optimization techniques

Common solutions

Tools and libraries

Summary

About Testing and Debugging

The benefits of testing

Painless JavaScript testing with Jest

Testing events

React DevTools

Redux DevTools

Summary

React Router

Installation and configuration

Creating our sections

Adding parameters to the routes

Summary

Anti-Patterns to be Avoided

Initializing the state using properties

Mutating the state

Using indexes as a key

Spreading properties on DOM elements

Summary

Deploying to Production

Creating our first Digital Ocean Droplet

Configuring nginx, PM2, and a domain

Implementing CircleCI for continuous integration

Summary

Next Steps

Contributing to React

Distributing your code

Publishing an npm package

Summary

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Mixins

Components are great to achieve reusability, but what if different components in different domains share the same behavior?

We do not want duplicated code in our applications and React give us a tool that we can use when we want to share functionalities across various components—mixins.

Using mixins is deprecated, but it is worth understanding the problems they try to solve and see what the possible alternative solutions are. Also, it could happen that you might have to work on a legacy project that uses an older version of React, and it makes sense to know what mixins are and how to deal with them.

First of all, mixins work only with the createClass factory, so if you are using classes, you cannot use mixins, and that is one of the reasons why their use is discouraged.

Suppose you are using createClass in your application and you find yourself needing to write...