 Resources from Andy Van Slaars in 2024

Building an application with React typically involves several tools. Whether you configure these on your own or use a tool meant to save you from the configuration like Create React App, the tools are still there. When you come up against a situation where you need to start from scratch or make changes to a webpack or babel configuration, it helps to understand what each tool does, how they fit together, and how they are configured. 

In this course, we’ll start from an empty directory and by the end, we will have configured a slim but powerful boilerplate project. Along the way, we’ll touch on each of the major tools and build up to the final setup to gain an understanding of each tool’s purpose and how they all work together to help you build and deliver an application.

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

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Modern JavaScript Tooling with React

Learn how you can use ramda.js to bring functional programming concepts into your JavaScript code. Ramda offers composability and immutability right out of the box, so you can leave your imperative code behind and build cleaner, more maintainable code.

A library designed specifically for a functional programming style, one that makes it easy to create functional pipelines, one that never mutates user data.

ramda

Functional Programming in JavaScript with Ramda.js

The tools available for unit testing have come a long way. While testing may never be “easy”, the available tools have certainly moved testing closer to the simple end of the spectrum. Full end to end testing hasn’t quite kept the same pace and as a result many applications are testing manually and often by users in production. Cypress provides a testing environment that makes end-to-end testing fast and reliable with a simple API that makes creating automated unit tests for your web applications a no-brainer.


Fast, easy and reliable testing for anything that runs in a browser.

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End to End testing with Cypress

In this collection, we build a minimal flashcard application using React, primarily focusing on function components and the hooks API. To make sure we can understand and maintain existing code, there are also a few lessons toward the end that use class components so you can get familiar with the syntax. We cover important React concepts, and sprinkle in libraries that are pretty standard in the ecosystem like @reach/router, Jest, and React testing library. We start with create-react-app so we can get right into it without worrying about configuring tooling. There's [a separate course for that here](https://egghead.io/courses/modern-javascript-tooling-with-react?af=5mx0ie)

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Build a React App with the Hooks API

JavaScript’s dynamic typing makes it incredibly flexible. That flexibility can lead to trouble though. When values have the potential to change types or to end up as `null` or `undefined`, that can lead to runtime errors in our code or bizarre bugs that take forever to track down because of type coercion. To battle this, we end up with code that is littered will conditionals for `null` or `undefined` values and type checks, making the core logic harder to read and refactor later. 

The **Maybe** encapsulates the type checking and guards against missing values for us. With **Maybe** in our toolbelt, we can keep our functions free of all the guardrails, outsource that work to the **Maybe** and keep our business logic free of all the clutter.

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

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Safer JavaScript with the Maybe Type

Managing state in modern web applications is hard. As applications grows in complexity, keeping track of state changes and mapping those changes back to your UI becomes increasingly difficult.

One way data flow makes managing state more approachable and lightens the cognitive load required to follow the flow of data through your application. Using Redux takes this idea to the next level and moves the state and the state changes and centralizes them in a global store, managed with pure reducer functions.

In this course you will learn how to build a production quality React application using Redux. We will build up from using redux by itself, so we can understand the core API and how that interacts with a React application, then we’ll move on to introduce `react-redux` to abstract away some of the underlying details and clean up our code. We’ll use middleware and a mocked API server to understand how asynchronous code fits into the Redux model and we’ll even deploy our finished work so we can see it running live in the cloud. 

If you are brand new to React, you’ll want to read the documentation and watch our free [React Fundamentals](https://egghead.io/courses/start-using-react-to-build-web-applications) course and our [Build Your First Production Quality React App](https://egghead.io/courses/build-your-first-production-quality-react-app) course. To get up to speed on Redux, you should check out Dan Abramov’s [Getting Started With Redux](https://egghead.io/courses/getting-started-with-redux) course.

Build A React App With Redux

D3, or Data Driven Documents, is the defacto standard for data visualization on the web. It's an incredibly powerful library that gives you all the tools you need to build just about visualization you can dream of.

D3 is not a collection of predefined charts. Instead, it's a robust set of utilities you can use to ingest and transform data, to map that data to screen values, and ultimately to manipulate the DOM to render your visuals.

When working with React, D3's desire to manipulate the DOM is at odds with React's goal of rendering the UI as a function of state. So how do we handle this? Simply put, we use D3 for everything up to the point where we want to render our output, and then we hand all that data to React for rendering.

In this course, we'll start from scratch and build out an SVG bar chart for some sample data. We'll lean on D3 for its tools and then hand that data off to React for rendering.

Create A Bar Chart with React and D3

With the variety of choice we have in building modern web applications using JavaScript, it can make it difficult to understand where to even begin. We live in a wondrous era, where every problem we have seems to have a corresponding javascript module on npm that we can install with just a few keystrokes. It’s easy!


Often, “easy” can mean the opposite of simple. Easy is “quick to do”, where simple is “quick to understand”.


KISS.


In this course you will learn how to build production quality React applications. We will strive to keep things as simple as possible, with minimal dependencies. Instead of typing `npm install`, we will build our own simple solutions first, to get a solid understanding of the problems that we are solving through libraries. We will build our tools in a functional style, and write appropriate unit tests to verify that they work as expected.


If you are brand new to React, you’ll want to read the documentation and watch our [free React Fundamentals course](https://egghead.io/courses/react-fundamentals).

Build Your First Production Quality React App

In this lesson we'll see how to use the `without` function to remove items in a known list from an array. Then we'll generate our exclusion list and apply it to `without` using `reduce`, `min`, `max` and `converge` to detect the highest and lowest values in an array and creating a new array that excludes those values.

Discard the High and Low Values From an Array of Numbers with Ramda

Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps.
It helps you write applications that behave consistently, run in different environments (client, server, and native), and are easy to test.

redux

We’ll refactor our existing code and break the pieces of the application into their own stateless functional components. We’ll use these components to build up our UI. We’ll also see how we can use ES6 destructuring syntax to accept just the keys we need from props to keep our JSX clean.

Refactor JSX in React to Stateless Functional Components

We’ll define a simple state object in the entry point of our application. Once the state has been defined, we’ll pass it into our root component as props and replace the static elements in our rendered output with values from the component’s props. We’ll move from static items to an array, seeing how we can use functions like map to render our UI.

Render in React Based on a Global State Object

We want to be able to show only items in a certain status so in this lesson, we’ll add a flag to indicate which items to show, and create a function to filter the todos based on that value. We’ll take advantage of route based state to control the filtering behavior.

Filter Data on Property Values in React

We’ll make the input field a “controlled component” by reacting to each change of the input and capturing it in the component state. Following this model gives us assurance that the UI is always a representation of the current application state.

Synchronize React UI and State with Controlled Components

We’ll refactor our existing code, making the todo form a separate component. We’ll pass values from the App container into the new component via props. We’ll look at the differences between state and props in React and see how state can be passed down to other components as props.

Create a Stateless Functional Component for an Input Form

In this lesson, we’ll refactor a series of function calls into a functional pipeline, making the code more declarative and removing the need for intermediate variables. Rather than reaching for a utility library, we’ll start by building our own pipe function to gain a clear understanding of how left-to-right function composition is accomplished in JavaScript. 

Create a Pipe Function to Enable Function Composition

We’ll create a Router component that will wrap our application and manage all URL related state. We’ll see how we can use React’s built in context mechanism to pass data and functions between components without having to pass props all the way down through the component tree.

Use React Context to Manage Application State Through Routes

Using pushState and passing route data via context allows our application to respond to route changes made from Link components, but using the back and forward buttons in the browser doesn’t update the application state as we would expect. In this lesson, we’ll add event handling to our Router component to handle history popState events so routing behavior is maintained for the back and forward buttons.

Keep React Application State in Sync with Browser History

We’ll add a message object to the application state and use that message to conditionally show a message component. We’ll also use a setTimeout to update our state and hide the message after a specified period of time.

Show Temporary Messages in a React Application

We’ll use fetch and refactor our client-side task completion logic to send an update to the server, and update the UI with a success message once the save has completed successfully.

Update Data on the Server with fetch in React

We’ll define a simple state object in the constructor of the App Component class. Once the state has been defined, we’ll replace the static elements in our rendered output with values from the component’s state. We’ll move from static items to an array, seeing how we can use functions like map to render our UI.

Render a React UI Based on Initial State

We’ll go from an empty directory to a solid foundation for an application by running a single command. The create-react-app tool handles all of the complicated setup for us so we can focus on building our application. 

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Andy Van Slaars