What this book covers

This book covers the following three parts:

• React: Chapter 1 to 11
• React Native: Chapter 12 to 23
• React Architecture: Chapter 23 to 26

Part I: React

Chapter 1, Why React?, covers the basics of what React really is, and why you want to use it.

Chapter 2, Rendering with JSX, explains that JSX is the syntax used by React to render content. HTML is the most common output, but JSX can be used to render many things, such as native UI components.

Chapter 3, Understanding Properties and State, shows how properties are passed to components, and how state re-renders components when it changes.

Chapter 4, Event Handling—The React Way, explains that events in React are specified in JSX. There are subtleties with how React processes events, and how your code should respond to them.

Chapter 5, Crafting Reusable Components, shows that components are often composed using smaller components. This means that you have to properly pass data and behaviour to child components.

Chapter 6, The React Component Lifecycle, explains how React components are created and destroyed all the time. There are several other lifecycle events that take place in between where you do things such as fetch data from the network.

Chapter 7, Validating Component Properties, shows that React has a mechanism that allows you to validate the types of properties that are passed to components. This ensures that there are no unexpected values passed to your component.

Chapter 8, Extending Components, provides an introduction to the mechanisms used to extend React components. These include inheritance and higher order components.

Chapter 9, Handling Navigation with Routes, navigation is an essential part of any web application. React handles routes declaratively using the react-router package.

Chapter 10, Server-Side React Components, discusses how React renders components to the DOM when rendered in the browser. It can also render components to strings, which is useful for rendering pages on the server and sending static content to the browser.

Chapter 11 Mobile-First React Components, explains that mobile web applications are fundamentally different from web applications designed for desktop screen resolutions. The react-bootstrap package can be used to build UIs in a mobilefirst fashion.

Part II: React Native

Chapter 12, Why React Native?, shows that React Native is React for mobile apps. If you’ve already invested in React for web applications, then why not leverage the same technology to provide a better mobile experience?

Chapter 13, Kickstarting React Native Projects, discusses that nobody likes writing boilerplate code or setting up project directories. React Native has tools to automate these mundane tasks.

Chapter 14, Building Responsive Layouts with Flexbox, explains why the Flexbox layout model is popular with web UI layouts using CSS. React Native uses the same mechanism to layout screens.

Chapter 15, Navigating Between Screens, discusses the fact that while navigation is an important part of web applications, mobile applications also need tools to handle how a user moves from screen to screen.

Chapter 16, Rendering Item Lists, shows that React Native has a list view component that’s perfect for rendering lists of items. You simply provide it with a data source, and it handles the rest.

Chapter 17, Showing Progress, explains that progress bars are great for showing a determinate amount of progress. When you don’t know how long something will take, you use a progress indicator. React Native has both of these components.

Chapter 18, Geolocation and Maps, shows that the react-native-maps package provides React Native with mapping capabilities. The Geolocation API that’s used in web applications is provided directly by React Native.

Chapter 19, Collecting User Input, shows that most applications need to collect input from the user. Mobile applications are no different, and React Native provides a variety of controls that are not unlike HTML form elements.

Chapter 20, Alerts, Notifications, and Confirmation, explains that alerts are for interrupting the user to let them know something important has happened, notifications are unobtrusive updates, and confirmation is used for getting an immediate answer.

Chapter 21, Responding to User Gestures, discusses how gestures on mobile devices are something that’s difficult to get right in the browser. Native apps, on the other hand, provide a much better experience for swiping, touching, and so on. React Native handles a lot of the details for you.

Chapter 22, Controlling Image Display, shows how images play a big role in most applications, either as icons, logos, or photographs of things. React Native has tools for loading images, scaling them, and placing them appropriately.

Chapter 23, Going Offline, explains that mobile devices tend to have volatile network connectivity. Therefore, mobile apps need to be able to handle temporary offline conditions. For this, React Native has local storage APIs.

Part III: React Architecture

Chapter 24, Handling Application State, discusses how application state is important for any React application, web or mobile. This is why understanding libraries such as Redux and Immutable.js is important.

Chapter 25, Why Relay and GraphQL?, explains that Relay and GraphQL, used together, is a novel approach to handling state at scale. It’s a query and mutation language, plus a library for wrapping React components.

Chapter 26, Building a Relay React App, shows that the real advantage of Relay and GraphQL is that your state schema is shared between web and native versions of your application.