Getting Started with React

by Doel Sengupta, Manu Singhal, Danillo Corvalan

Overview

A light but powerful way to build dynamic real-time applications using ReactJS

About This Book

• Learn how to develop powerful JavaScript applications using ReactJS
• Integrate a React-based app with an external API (Facebook login) while using React components, with the Facebook developer app
• Implement the Reactive paradigm to build stateless and asynchronous apps with React

Who This Book Is For

This book is for any front-end web or mobile-app developer who wants to learn ReactJS. Knowledge of basic JavaScript will give you a good head start with the book.

What You Will Learn

• Understand the ReactJS basics through an overview
• Install and create your first React component
• Refactor the ReactJS component using JSX
• Integrate your React application with the Facebook login and Graph API, then fetch data from your liked pages in Facebook and display them in a browser
• Handle UI elements events with React, respond to users input, and create stateful components
• Use some core lifecycle events for integration and find out about ES6 syntaxes in the React world
• Understand the FLUX architecture and create an application using FLUX with React
• Make a component more reusable with mixins and validation helpers and structure your components properly
• Explore techniques to test your ReactJS code
• Deploy your code using webpack and Gulp

In Detail

ReactJS, popularly known as the V (view) of the MVC architecture, was developed by the Facebook and Instagram developers. It follows a unidirectional data flow, virtual DOM, and DOM difference that are generously leveraged in order to increase the performance of the UI.

Getting Started with React will help you implement the Reactive paradigm to build stateless and asynchronous apps with React. We will begin with an overview of ReactJS and its evolution over the years, followed by building a simple React component. We will then build the same react component with JSX syntax to demystify its usage. You will see how to configure the Facebook Graph API, get your likes list, and render it using React.

Following this, we will break the UI into components and you'll learn how to establish communication between them and respond to users input/events in order to have the UI reflect their state. You'll also get to grips with the ES6 syntaxes.

Moving ahead, we will delve into the FLUX and its architecture, which is used to build client-side web applications and complements React's composable view components by utilizing a unidirectional data flow. Towards the end, you'll find out how to make your components reusable, and test and deploy them into a production environment. Finally, we'll briefly touch on other topics such as React on the server side, Redux and some advanced concepts.

Style and approach

The book follows a step-by-step, practical, tutorial approach with examples that explain the key concepts of ReactJS. Each topic is sequentially explained and contextually placed to give sufficient details of ReactJS.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785284106
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	04/29/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	212
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Doel Sengupta is a software programmer and is working in the industry for over 7 years, as a DevOps engineer and as a developer building enterprise level Web and mobile applications using RubyonRails and Rhomobile, Chef. Currently she is exploring the Javascript ecosystem. She has been a speaker in Ruby conferences. She finds interest in life sciences and has publications of her work in customised human joint prostheses design using Ansys & Mimics. She is an avid blogger (www.doels.net) writing about her technical and not-so-technical passions like culinary, photography, films. Follow her on twitter @doelsengupta.

Manu Singhal has been a programmer for 8 years and loves to code on Ruby and React. These days, he is busy cofounding a startup in e-commerce. In earlier roles, he has developed many enterprise and consumer based web/mobile applications and has also been a speaker at Ruby Conferences in India and the USA. He never misses a chance to play tennis and go hiking.
He has worked with Tata Consultancy Services and McKinsey & Company as a software developer and an architect.
He has contributed in books on Rhomobile and RubyMotion by Packt earlier.

Danillo Corvalan is a software engineer who is passionate about software patterns and practices. He has a keen interest in the rapidly changing world of software development. He is quite insistent about the need of fast and reliable frameworks. He is originally from Brazil, now living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He loves biking a lot.
In Brazil, he worked on applications for the general public and lawyers, at the Court of Justice in his hometown city, Cuiaba/MT. Then, he moved to Florianopolis/SC, and worked at Bravi Software for developing hybrid and responsive web apps for education. Now, in Amsterdam, he is working at Vigour.io and helping to develop live multiscreen and responsive apps. From the web client-side perspective, in general, he has been in touch with technologies, such as vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, Backbone, and ReactJS.
For the past 5 years, Danillo has also worked with open source platforms and JavaScript on the server side (Node.js). He has played with React Native in order to develop native mobile applications with ReactJS.