Getting Started with React

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.