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.

react

In this course we will begin with nothing more than an empty directory & a text editor. Through small, focussed lessons we’ll learn how to setup our app with Webpack & Babel and how to configure these tools for use with Preact. Then we’ll move on to learning how to create components and how the Preact API mirrors that of React - highlighting the differences/additions along the way. Finally we’ll look at the interoperability with existing popular libraries in the React community such as Redux & React Router and with the popular development tools such as Redux Dev Tools & React Dev-Tools

Although technically you can run Preact without any tools or pre-compiling, we’ll get a much better development experience by using modern versions of Javascript along with JSX. To achieve this, we'll be installing `babel-core` along with [`babel-preset-env`](https://egghead.io/lessons/node-js-use-babel-preset-env-with-native-node-features-and-also-use-babel-plugins). This combination will provide us with a set of plugins suitable for transpiling our code for use in modern browsers. It doesn't include support for JSX however, so we'll add the `babel-plugin-transform-react-jsx` plugin to handle that part. Along with creating a Javascript file that can be executed in the browser, we also want to preview our work each time we change a file - so we install [Webpack](https://egghead.io/playlists/learning-webpack) and the Webpack Dev Server to handle both of those tasks. The final dependency we install is `babel-loader` which will allow the source files being accessed by Webpack to first be processed by Babel and the plugins we specified.

Install Development Tools for Preact

In this lesson we will create a ‘webpack.config.js’ file from scratch. Along the way we’ll learn about the entry point, how to specify output, how to configure loaders, the Preact-specific parts of the Babel configuration, and finally how to use the ‘webpack-dev-server’ via a script in the ‘package.json’ file

Configure Webpack 2 and Babel for use with Preact

By creating a simple ‘hello world’ example application first in vanilla Javascript, and then in Preact without any tools, we’ll learn what type of problems Preact is solving for us and how is works at a low level. Then we’ll switch to a Webpack + Babel setup  we’ll cover some fundamental concepts such as, which imports we need, how to create a component, how to use JSX and finally how to render our component into a target element in a web page.

Create a Hello World App with Preact

Many components within an application can be rendered using only data that is ‘passed’ to them by a parent. We call these “Functional Components” as they do not contain any internal state. In this lesson we look at how to define these types of components and how to pass data to them.

Define Functional Components in Preact

When dealing with Components, there’s often the need to either have some local state controlled by the component (such as form input fields) or to tap into the lifecycle events of the component. In this lesson we’ll give some practical examples of both.


Define Stateful Components in Preact

Preact offers, in addition to the regular component API from React, the ability to access both props & state as function parameters to the render method. This lesson will cover an example of how to utilize this convenience along with how destructuring can make it even nicer to work with.

Use State and Props in the Component Render Function

Storing and updating values inside a component’s local state (known as controlled components) is such a common pattern that Preact offers a really handy feature called ‘link state’ that not only removes the need to bind class methods, but also handles the setting of new values. This can remove the need for ‘setter’ style methods on classes and in this lesson we’ll look at an example of tracking the value of a ‘text input’

Use Link State to Automatically Handle State Changes

Not every app is greenfield, and it would be a shame if existing React apps could not benefit from the micro-size of Preact. In this lesson we’ll discuss what preact-compat is, how to use it, and some examples of the file-size savings available. https://github.com/developit/preact-compat

 Reduce the Size of a React App in Two Lines with preact-compat

Some applications only need a very minimal routing solution. This lesson will cover a practical example showing the router in use. We’ll build a simple search feature that accepts user input and then calls the github API. We’ll see how to access route parameters, how to manually & automatically navigate around, and finally how to handle un-matched path. https://github.com/developit/preact-router

Handle Simple Routing with preact-router

React-router is the community favourite routing solution - it can handle all of your complex routing needs and in this lesson we’ll cover what’s needed to enable it’s use within Preact. https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router

Integrate react-router with Preact

Redux is one of the most popular state-management libraries and although not specific to React, it is widely used with it. This is why the author of Preact has released a package called preact-redux, which is a simple wrapper around the main react-redux package that enables it to be used in a Preact application without any other changes to your codebase. In this lesson we refactor a stateful component to use Redux + Redux-thunk. https://github.com/developit/preact-redux

Integrate Redux with Preact

Preact and Redux is a great combination, made even more so by the amazing dev tools extension that can be installed into both Chrome and Firefox. In this lesson we’ll see how to enable it and how it works seamlessly with Preact.
https://github.com/zalmoxisus/redux-devtools-extension#12-advanced-store-setup

Up and running with Preact

Shane Osbourne

Course Content