react

Like many, many others, I'm in the pool of leveling up my JavaScript skills and learning how to put React to use. That's why Brad Frost resonated with me when he posted My Struggle to Learn React."

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You may have wondered lately what all the buzz is about Context and what it might mean for you and your React sites. Before Context, when the management of state gets complicated beyond the functionality of setState, you likely had to make use of a third party library. Thanks to recent updates by the awesome React team, we now have Context which might help with some state management issues.

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As your application becomes more complex, the management of state can become tedious. A component's state is meant to be self-contained, which makes sharing state across multiple components a headache. Redux is usually the go-to library to manage state in React, however, depending on how complex your application is, you might not need Redux.

Unstated is an alternative that provides you with the functionality to manage state across multiple components with a Container class and Provider and Subscribe components. Let's see Unstated in action by creating a simple counter and then look at a more advanced to-do application.

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React is fast! Some of that speed comes from updating only the parts of the DOM that need it. Less for you to worry about and a speed gain to boot. As long as you understand the workings of setState(), you should be good to go. However, it’s also important to familiarize yourself with how this amazing library updates the DOM of your application. Knowing this will be instrumental in your work as a React developer.

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React components can, and often do, have state. State can be anything, but think of things like whether a user is logged in or not and displaying the correct username based on which account is active. Or an array of blog posts. Or if a modal is open or not and which tab within it is active.

React components with state render UI based on that state. When the state of components changes, so does the component UI.

That makes understanding when and how to change the state of your component important. At the end of this tutorial, you should know how setState works, and be able to avoid common pitfalls that many of us hit when when learning React.

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If you have been in the React ecosystem for a while, there is a possibility that you have heard about Higher Order Components. Let’s look at a simple implementation while also trying to explain the core idea. From here you should get a good idea of how they work and even put them to use.

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I’ve recently published my first ever open source npm package! It makes SVG illustrations from unDraw into customizable React components.

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