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!

Data fetching

In the preceding section, we saw the different patterns we can put in place to share data between components in the tree. It is now time to view how to fetch data in React and where the data fetching logic should be located. The examples in this section use the fetch function to make web requests, which is a modern replacement for XMLHttpRequest.

At the time of writing, it is natively implemented in Chrome and Firefox, and if you need to support different browsers, you must use the fetch polyfill by GitHub:
https://github.com/github/fetch.

We are also going to use the public GitHub APIs to load some data, and the endpoint we will use is the one that returns a list of gists, given a username, for example,
https://api.github.com/users/:username/gists.

Gists are snippets of code that can be shared easily between developers. The first component that we will build is...