What this book covers
Chapter 1, Building a Foundation in React, In order to work effectively in React Native, you must first understand React. This chapter explains the motivation behind React and teaches you how to think in React.
Chapter 2, Saying Hello World in React Native, contains two primary topics. First, we’ll review how React Native works and compare it to other popular mobile development options. Then, we’ll switch gears and focus on configuring your computer to build your first React Native project for iOS.
Chapter 3, Styling and Layout in React Native, React Native borrows many concepts from the web development world, including some of the best parts of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It also deliberately avoids some of CSS’s less desirable qualities. This chapter explains how to style React Native apps and how to use Flexbox to layout components.
Chapter 4, Starting our Project with React Native Components, React Native includes many powerful components and APIs. This chapter demonstrates how to use many of these as we begin to build our news reader app, called Readly.
Chapter 5, Flux and Redux, ... The React community has largely eschewed the Model View Controller pattern in favor of a unidirectional data flow pattern called Flux. In this chapter, we’ll help you think in Flux and explain how to leverage a popular Flux implementation known as Redux.
Chapter 6, Integrating with the NYT API and Redux, builds upon what we learned in this chapter. In order to bring our Readly app to life, we’ll implement Redux and Redux middleware as a means of managing our data and communicating with the New York Times API.
Chapter 7, Navigation & Advanced APIs, Navigation in React Native has been a long journey resulting in an abundance of navigation options. But which should you choose? This chapter will make sense of these options. We’ll then apply experimental navigation components along with other advanced React Native APIs to our project.
Chapter 8, Animation and Gestures in React Native, React Native offers two primary ways of creating fluid animations. This chapter will explain how to apply each of these along with touch gesture support to build out an on boarding experience for our Readly app.
Chapter 9, Refactoring for Android, React Native makes cross platform development simple. However, configuring your computer to actually build for Android is a bit less than simple. This chapter will walk you through, step by step, how to install and configure all the tools necessary for Android development. We’ll then revisit our project, refactoring it to both work and feel like a first class Android app.
Chapter 10, Using and Writing Native Modules, One of the most amazing parts of React Native is that it doesn’t limit you to the components and APIs that come packaged with the framework. If you want your app to do something else, you can either bridge custom native code to React Native or include other third-party libraries. This chapter adds additional capabilities to our project by exploring how to create custom native code written in Objective C for iOS and Java for Android.
Chapter 11, Preparing for Production, Discovering the root cause of bug or performance problem can be a real chore. In this chapter we’ll introduce Jest, a testing framework along with other tools for uncovering pesky performance problems. Finally, we’ll show you how to bundle your apps so you can ship them to the iOS and Android stores.
Chapter 12, React Native Tools & Resources, React Native is praised for its awesome developer experience and cross platform support. But can we take React Native even further? In this final chapter, we’ll show off some tools that can improve upon how you build React Native apps. Then we’ll explore a few React Native projects that allow us to extend platform support to the web, macOS, and even Windows.
