A lot has changed in the React ecosystem since the first edition of React Essentials. More people are building React applications, there are mature libraries and frameworks that support React applications, and React 16 has been released. The explosive growth of React over such a short period of time can be attributed to a number of factors: the excellent community and related resources, the vastness of the React ecosystem and the maturation of certain staple projects, and of course, the React team and their willingness to make developer feedback a priority item as the project continues to evolve.
I feel privileged to be involved with such an important React title. As the name suggests, this book is aimed at teaching the essentials of React. This latest edition reflects changes in the latest version of React, using Redux for managing state, and the JavaScript language itself.
Join me. Let's become experts as React becomes the standard for building user interfaces.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, What's New in React 16, introduces the major changes in React 16. This includes the fundamental changes to how rendering and reconciliation work under the hood, and other new features that are exposed via the API.
Chapter 2, Installing Powerful Tools for Your Project, outlines the goal of this book and explains what modern tools you need to install in order to build React applications efficiently. It introduces each tool and provides step-by-step instructions on how to install each of them. Then, it creates a structure for the project that we'll be building in this book.
Chapter 3, Creating Your First React Element, explains how to install React and introduces virtual DOM. Then, it explains what React Element is and how to create and render one with native JavaScript syntax. Finally, it introduces the JSX syntax and shows how to create React Elements using JSX.
Chapter 4, Creating Your First React Component, introduces React components. It explains the difference between stateless and stateful React components and how to decide which one to use. Then, it guides you through the process of creating both kinds.
Chapter 5, Making Your React Components Reactive, explains how to solve a problem with React and walks you through the process of planning your React application. It creates a React component that encapsulates the entire React application that we build in this book. It explains the relationship between parent and child React components.
Chapter 6, Using Your React Components with Another Library, explores how to use third-party JavaScript libraries with your React components. It introduces the lifecycle of your React components, demonstrates how to use mounting methods, and shows how to create new React components for our book's project.
Chapter 7, Updating Your React Components, introduces the updating methods for the lifecycles of your React components. This covers how to use CSS styles in JavaScript. It explains how to validate and set the default properties of the components.
Chapter 8, Building Complex React Components, focuses on building more complex React components. It explores the details of how to implement different React components and how to put them together into one coherent and fully functional React application.
Chapter 9, Testing Your React Application with Jest, explains the idea of unit testing and how to write and run your unit tests with Jest. It also demonstrates how to test your React components. It discusses test suites, specs, expectations, and matchers.
Chapter 10, Supercharging Your React Architecture with Flux, discusses how to improve the architecture of our React application. It introduces the Flux architecture and explains the role of dispatchers, stores, and action creators.
Chapter 11, Preparing Your React Application for Painless Maintenance with Flux, explains how to decouple concerns in your React application with Flux. It refactors our React application to allow painless maintainability in the future.
Chapter 12, Refining Your Flux Apps with Redux, walks you through the main features of the Flux library, followed by a complete refactoring of an application to use Redux as the main mechanism to control state.
