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Introduction to React
Gackenheimer C., Apress, New York, NY, 2015. 148 pp. Type: Book (978-1-484212-46-2)
Date Reviewed: Jun 20 2016

React is Facebook’s library for creating complex responsive user interfaces in JavaScript. I came to this book with some knowledge of what to expect. I have used the ClojureScript Reagent and OM libraries that are layered upon React, and was interested in learning more about the underlying application programming interfaces (APIs).

React is not intended to offer broad functionality. It is not comparable to the many existing model-view-controller (MVC) frameworks. Rather, it was written to solve one problem well: to offer an abstraction layer for browser-based user interfaces whose data changes over time. The key idea is to separate the data to be rendered from the rendering of that data. This is done by maintaining a hidden data structure parallel to the browser’s document object model (DOM). The developer’s presentation layer simply modifies this data structure. It lets React handle efficient selective rendering of changed components to be seen by the user.

That is what I knew before I started this book. The book filled in this knowledge and explained how the pieces fit together, including many facts that were hidden or abstracted by the ClojureScript libraries I use but must be understood by developers using React as intended, in JavaScript.

In the book, chapter 1 elaborates the React approach and presents some examples of how to use the framework. Chapter 2 dives into the React APIs, as of version 0.13.x of the library. The next chapter explains the JSX templating syntax that can be used to expressively embed React components in JavaScript code, using an Extensible Markup Language/Hypertext Markup Language (XML/HTML)-like syntax. Chapter 4 brings it all together by showing how to write a full React application. The final two chapters of the book segue into a discussion of Flux, an MVC library designed to work well with React. It ends with a full example, a canonical TodoMVC app, and includes a link to the source on GitHub.

This book is aimed at active practitioners. It is small, dense, and fast-paced. In style, it is much more of a reference than a tutorial. Understanding it requires prior knowledge or reading it while gaining insight via active development and using the book to answer questions. In this role, I think the book is a fine resource.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  David Goldfarb Review #: CR144515 (1609-0626)
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