React from Scratch
React from Scratch
A friendly guide for absolute beginners
About the Book
This book is my answer to the question: how to teach React to a complete beginner, in as little time as possible?
Need to learn the basics quickly? This is your book.
About the Author
Table of Contents
-
Chapter 0: Before we start
- 0.1 Assumptions: Things to have before we start
- 0.2 Disclaimer
-
Chapter 1: Building the simplest possible React app
- 1.0 What is React?
- 1.1 Install React Developer Tools in your Browser
- 1.2 Let’s build the simplest possible React app
- 1.3 Run our default React app and examine it in the browser
- 1.4 Inspecting the app using React Developer Tools
-
1.5 What happens when we run the
npx create-react-app <appName>? - 1.6 Understanding our default React app’s folder and file structure
-
1.7 Inspecting the contents of
package.json - 1.8 Altering the default app
-
Chapter 2: Serving React from a CDN and running it without a build step
- 2.1 Re-building the simplest app without a build step using Codepen.io
- 2.2 Load another node into another div
-
2.3 Challenge: Render three more
h2headings - 2.4 Adding HTML attributes using React.createElement
- 2.5 What happened to the DOM?
- Some Conclusions
- 2.6 Optimizing our simplest example’s code, the React way: introducing JSX
- 2.7 Exercise: Find at least one interesting React Codepen
- 2.8 Making our simplest app a bit more dynamic, using JSX
-
Chapter 3: Back to the Basics
-
3.1 Building a new version of the
create-react-appstarter application - 3.2 How does our React app compile and how does it get watched?
- 3.3 Exercise 1: Build a new app about a car (locally)
- 3.4 Exercise 2: Build a new app about a car (on Codepen)
- 3.5 A fun addition to our Car codepen: adding an image from unsplash.com
-
3.1 Building a new version of the
-
Chapter 4, Intermission: Build a Bootstrap Layout
- 4.1 Prototyping our website layout’s components
- 4.2 Adding Bootstrap 5
- 4.3 Adding the Navbar - the MainMenu component
- 4.4 Adding the Jumbotron component
- 4.5 Fixing the rendering issue
- 4.6 Adding the Footer component
- 4.7 Coding our React Bootstrap layout locally
-
4.8 Updating the
App.jsfile - 4.9 One component per file
-
4.10 Importing a component to
App.js - 4.11 Adding the jumbotron and the footer component
-
Chapter 5: Adding icons
- 5.1 Importing the icons module
- 5.2 Understanding how react-icons work
- 5.3 Adding another icon to a component
-
Chapter 6: Regular functions to arrow functions
- 6.1 What does Babel do with our ES6 function components?
-
Chapter 7: Looping over data
- 7.1 Adding the data file
- 7.2 Displaying the array data
- 7.3 Passing props to display the data dynamically
- 7.4 Adding another prop
- 7.5 Props destructuring
-
Chapter 8: Beginner-level tips and tricks
- 8.1 Code organization: Reorganizing our reactbootstrap1 app
- 8.2 Passing objects as props
- 8.3 Default props
- 8.4 Using ternary statements in our components
- 8.5 Using fragments
- 8.6 Handling events
- 8.7 Simplifying a complex component (without props)
- 8.8 Simplifying a complex component (with props)
- 8.9 Don’t display a component if a prop is not passed in the parent
- 8.10 Conditionally returning a different string than the one passed in from a prop
- Conclusion
-
Chapter 9: Class-based components, functional components, and React hooks
- 9.1 Class components, functional components… what’s all the fuss about?
- 9.2 Class components
- 9.3 React Hooks
-
9.4 The
useStateReact Hook - 9.5 An example of updating text on a button click
- 9.6 Display text from an array on button click using useState in React
-
9.7 Rendering
lielements from an array of objects -
9.8 An example of updating a value from an input element using the
useStatehook
- Chapter 10: Forms in React
-
Chapter 11: Let’s build a todo app
- Add the App component with basic static structure
- Get the initial state dynamically using the useState React hook
- Convert the HTML form element to a separate functional component
- Extract the state data to a separate component
- Handle submit events on the form
- Validate that the form input isn’t blank
-
Get the value of user input and store it in the
TodoInputcomponent’s state variable - Update the todos state with user-provided input
- Add the done button on each of the todo items
- Add the styling on the todos that are done
- Add the delete todo functionality
- Make the input text reset after a newly added todo
- Make the buttons not lose opacity on the Done toggle
- Make the Done button’s text value update based on the state of the todo item
-
Chapter 12: Rebuild a Todo app using create-react-app
- Planning our local todo app
- Generate the boilerplate React app
- Building the structure for all the components
- Adding the static content for all the components
- Adding state using useState
- Adding state to the TodoInput component
- Improving the Todo component with methods from the App component
- Updating the TodoInput component so that it adds todos
- Conclusion
- What to do next?
-
Chapter 13: Additional tips and tricks
- Passing a single prop to simplify components
- Props are immutable
- Building a wrapper component
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