Adam Boduch

To enhance its social media software, Facebook commissioned a JavaScript framework that makes clicking around on a website much more pleasureful for users. Instead of waiting for web servers to respond, the content requests are handled in the background and rendered by JavaScript on the client’s computer. This framework, called React, has become one of the leading UI frameworks available for web development today, along with Vue.js. This book introduces React.js and gets developers up-to-speed to write code to meet user needs.

This book covers both React and React Native. React Native is oriented around developing mobile apps through JavaScript and JSX. I did not read this section as I’m primarily interested in using React for modern web development. Both use JSX – an extended and more powerful and expressive version of JavaScript.

Boduch and Derks introduce the framework and coach readers on how to get started writing programs in the language. Code examples abound and are available for download on their GitHub site. In short time, I was able to code up a new web app in less time than it normally takes me with pure JavaScript. Because React is state driven and separates its data inputs from its rendering, the web app was able to be efficiently written without tons of tedious, detailed jQuery calls. I became aware of how pleasureful writing UI code could be for the programmer!

Later chapters delve into specifics on how to build off of React into more interesting uses. For example, code for a simple client-side router is shown. Also, advanced UI design packages are presented along with examples of how to set up server-side React using Node.js and Express. React has a lot of potential applications, and the authors make it clear how different solutions can be implemented.

This book’s main audience is software developers. Although the first chapter provides a high-level overview appropriate for IT business folk, the rest of the book uses many coding examples. Coding examples are great for software developers, but others will probably feel lost amidst all the detail. Readers should already be familiar with the basics of web development; this book merely builds on those foundations. Again, I cannot comment on the mobile development aspects either since those were not relevant for my needs. At around 500 pages and impressively in its third edition, this book provides a thorough overview for an emerging, hot technology. My biggest surprise is how fun React is to code in – always a good reaction when learning a language.… (mais)