Book Image

React and React Native - Fourth Edition

By : Adam Boduch, Roy Derks, Mikhail Sakhniuk
Book Image

React and React Native - Fourth Edition

By: Adam Boduch, Roy Derks, Mikhail Sakhniuk

Overview of this book

Over the years, React and React Native has proven itself among JavaScript developers as a popular choice for a complete and practical guide to the React ecosystem. This fourth edition comes with the latest features, enhancements, and fixes to align with React 18, while also being compatible with React Native. It includes new chapters covering critical features and concepts in modern cross-platform app development with React. From the basics of React to popular components such as Hooks, GraphQL, and NativeBase, this definitive guide will help you become a professional React developer in a step-by-step manner. You'll begin by learning about the essential building blocks of React components. As you advance through the chapters, you'll work with higher-level functionalities in application development and then put your knowledge to work by developing user interface components for the web and native platforms. In the concluding chapters, you'll learn how to bring your application together with robust data architecture. By the end of this book, you'll be able to build React applications for the web and React Native applications for multiple mobile platforms.
Table of Contents (36 chapters)
1
Part 1 – React
15
Part 2 – React Native
31
Part 3 – React Architecture

Performing initialization and cleanup actions

Often, our React components need to perform actions when the component is created. For example, a common initialization action is to fetch API data that the component needs. Another common action is to make sure that any pending API requests are canceled when the component is removed. In this section, you'll learn about the useEffect() Hook and how it can help you with these two scenarios. You'll also learn how to make sure that the initialization code doesn't run too often.

Fetching component data

The useEffect() Hook is used to run "side-effects" in your component. Another way to think about side-effect code is that functional components have only one job – returning JSX content to render. If the component needs to do something else, such as fetching API data, this should be done in a useEffect() Hook. For example, if you were to just make the API call as part of your component function, you would...