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Developing a React Edge: The JavaScript Library for User Interfaces
React.js was born to bring the PHP style work flow to client side applications. React.js has a narrow scope, and it is concerned with only updating the DOM and responding to events. React.js is not a Model-View-Controller framework; it is actually the V in MVC. This narrow scope gives you the freedom to incorporate React into a wide variety of systems. In this book we cover all aspects of React.js with the help of a Survey Builder example.
234 pages, Paperback
First published November 19, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 8, 2017
an early book on react, now now better ones have been published
March 11, 2015
Significantly better than "Developing Backbone Edge", but still has a lot of room for improvement.
What I liked:
1.) Deep enough for a starter.
2.) Reasonably structured (there's not much jumping around).
3.) Quite a lot of space for testing.
4.) Sometimes it sacrifices depth for breadth, but each of "satellite" topics that were not must-have, but are included in this book was truly interesting.
What I didn't like:
1.) Editor did a good job in terms of checking typos, but (s)he skipped obvious errors in terms of understandability - in book's content there are some assumptions / rules / definitions that were not introduced in previous chapters.
2.) Flux description is fine in conceptual terms, but code to model correspondence is not described carefully enough
3.) Not enough real-life use case examples. Or rather - the ones that are provided are fine (and very well formatted) but they are too narrow - focused on very small code constructs.
In general - it's a good starter for React, but it requires additional sources of knowledge.
If you're looking for one-stop source instead, go for Egghead.io.
What I liked:
1.) Deep enough for a starter.
2.) Reasonably structured (there's not much jumping around).
3.) Quite a lot of space for testing.
4.) Sometimes it sacrifices depth for breadth, but each of "satellite" topics that were not must-have, but are included in this book was truly interesting.
What I didn't like:
1.) Editor did a good job in terms of checking typos, but (s)he skipped obvious errors in terms of understandability - in book's content there are some assumptions / rules / definitions that were not introduced in previous chapters.
2.) Flux description is fine in conceptual terms, but code to model correspondence is not described carefully enough
3.) Not enough real-life use case examples. Or rather - the ones that are provided are fine (and very well formatted) but they are too narrow - focused on very small code constructs.
In general - it's a good starter for React, but it requires additional sources of knowledge.
If you're looking for one-stop source instead, go for Egghead.io.
June 28, 2015
When I started this book I had no experience with React whatsoever. I read 5 first chapters of this book and I need to say they felt pretty bad. It didn't help me move any closer to writing anything useful in React. Instead of going further with this book I jumped to reading blogs and online tutorials and (as situation forced me to) to implementing actual application.
After 3 weeks of intensive hacking with React I went back to this book and actually finished it. 2nd approach was much better - I felt I understood everything much better and it all started to fall into right place. Actually from this perspective I'd say material covered in this book is really good - it doesn't go too far into details (which I would forget quickly anyway) but it covers broadly all the important stuff - React way, testing, architecture, integration.
So to summarize - this book is pretty good introductory material but be sure to have some initial exposure to React. IMHO reading some tutorials won't be enough. Just go with actual (real-life) application for 1-2-3 weeks and after that you should be able to get the most from this book.
After 3 weeks of intensive hacking with React I went back to this book and actually finished it. 2nd approach was much better - I felt I understood everything much better and it all started to fall into right place. Actually from this perspective I'd say material covered in this book is really good - it doesn't go too far into details (which I would forget quickly anyway) but it covers broadly all the important stuff - React way, testing, architecture, integration.
So to summarize - this book is pretty good introductory material but be sure to have some initial exposure to React. IMHO reading some tutorials won't be enough. Just go with actual (real-life) application for 1-2-3 weeks and after that you should be able to get the most from this book.
April 10, 2015
This book is written in a tutorial format, which I never found very appealing. Apart from that, the React world is moving very fast at this point and the content of the book is bound to be out of date very soon. As a matter of fact, it already is as I'm writing this, after the release of React 0.13. There are lots of excellent tutorials and resources online, and this is merely a decent snapshot of what you'd find after 15 minutes of googling at the time the book was written, in my opinion.
June 7, 2016
This review is for the second edition of the book (April 2016). Having just taught a class on React and the MERN stack, I can honestly say this book is a fantastic primer. It does a great job getting to the fundamentals of React without getting over-buried in code examples.
For someone looking to understand the "big picture" of what React is, how components work, and the data flow approach -- this is a great place
For someone looking to understand the "big picture" of what React is, how components work, and the data flow approach -- this is a great place
December 28, 2015
Excluding the fact that the book is out-dated, it's still a bad read for React.
It doesn't deliver more information than what you would find in a React tutorial or the official docs.
The examples aren't concise and don't really deliver the author's goals.
This book definitely needs a new version, otherwise it's not a good read.
It doesn't deliver more information than what you would find in a React tutorial or the official docs.
The examples aren't concise and don't really deliver the author's goals.
This book definitely needs a new version, otherwise it's not a good read.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews