Getting Started with React

Key Features

• 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

Book Description

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 friends 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 building a chart component that will integrate with D3.

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 and the new architecture about controller free design proposed by Facebook.

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

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, and loves biking a lot.

In Brazil, he has 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) and has played with React Native in order to develop native mobile applications with ReactJS.

Doel Sengupta is a programmer and has worked in the industry for over 6 years in RubyOnRails, Chef (DevOps), and Rhomobile. She can be found giving talks at various conferences and taking part in various meetups. Apart from the IT world, she takes a keen interest in medical-related topics. She is an avid blogger (at www.doels.net) and writes about about her technical and not-so-technical passions such as culinary, photography, films, and more.

Manu Singhal is programmer with 8 years of experience and loves to code on Ruby and React. These days he is busy co-founding a startup in ecommerce. In his 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 US.

He has been a part of Tata Consultancy Services and McKinsey & Company as software developer and architect, respectively. He has previously contributed to books on Rhomobile & RubyMotion by Packt.

He never misses a chance to play tennis and go hiking.