Learn D3, Grep and Mobx

Developing logic-rich applications is a key skill to have.

The TypeScript–React combination helps you unlock that skill, and it’s a great developer experience in terms of writing understandable and refactorable HTML. But the default state management for React has a long way to go to feel simple and maintainable — and that’s where MobX makes your life so much easier. MobX keeps things simple without using complicated setups like `provider` and `connect` that provide way too little value for all the mental overhead. 

In this course, you’ll see how to model your React application logic using simple JavaScript classes — and with the help of MobX, make those classes the beating heart of your React applications. You’ll learn:

- that you don't need advanced annotations and TypeScript features to use MobX
- how to easily refactor code through TypeScript
- how to use TypeScript to track the flow of state as properties change

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

Develop React Applications with Mobx and TypeScript

MobX State Tree (MST) is a library that helps you organize your application states in a very structured manner. It allows you to create a component model, but for your data!

Course instructor Michel Weststrate—creator of Mobx—will teach you to model application state after your problem domain with MST. You will get hands-on practice and see how MST lets you solve problems with its out-of-the-box support for asynchronous actions, patches, snapshots, and middleware.

Over the 17 lessons, you’ll build a little bookshop application using React, MST, and create-react-app, while learning how to manage the lifecycle of your data by describing data models. 

Join Michel in one of the most popular courses on egghead!

Manage Application State with Mobx-state-tree

CMD+F in your text editor can only get you so far! In this course, we will learn to use grep and find, two powerful command-line utilities, to search through and explore our codebase. Learn to search specific files and folders, using regular expressions to look for -- or ignore! -- particular phrases. We'll cover how to search recursively, get more context on your results, and some simple tricks to make your searches faster and more targeted.


Once you're familiar with grep and find, you'll be able to quickly answer questions such as: Do I use this function anywhere other than my tests? Where does this file get imported? Whether you're working on a new feature, reading a codebase for the first time, or refactoring existing code, grep and find can help you work faster and more effectively.

A Unix command used to search files for the occurrence of a string of characters that matches a specified pattern.

grep

Use Grep for Fast Search from the Command Line

In this course we will learn and demonstrate the fundamental concepts and APIs of D3, on our way to building several common chart types. We’ll start with the building blocks upon which all D3 visualizations are built; things like scales, interpolators, and selections. We’ll see how to load data with D3, and how to put its full name, Data Driven Documents, into action. We’ll build column and bar charts, scatter plots, and area charts. Most importantly, we’ll gain an understanding of the conventions and patterns that underlie all D3 projects and examples, enabling you to dissect, understand, and build virtually any D3 visualization on the internet.

D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.

Build Interactive JavaScript Charts with D3 v4

MobX is designed to enable building web applications with a complex data model in an intuitive and very performant manner. Using React and MobX is currently the simplest way to build component based web applications.

"Half the code, twice the fun" is how people describe MobX, or "So simple, I cannot believe it just works". 



Manage Complex State in React Apps with MobX

This course covers D3 v3. If you'd like to learn about v4 of D3 (the latest version) [click here for the course on that](https://egghead.io/courses/build-interactive-javascript-charts-with-d3-v4).

This series will gently guide you through the first steps in getting to know D3. The curve can be steep, but with a few simple tools, you'll be charting your buns off in no time flat.

Use D3 (v3) to Build Interactive Charts with JavaScript

Most of D3’s native selection APIs also return the selection (or a new selection), to enable multiple method calls to be chained together. Since the code you write isn’t on the selection prototype, chaining your methods would take some extra work. `selection.call()` will call any function reference you give it, providing the selection as the first parameter, and then it returns the selection for you to ensure chaining is supported.

Better Code Organization with selection.call() with D3 v4

Making SVGs responsive is unfortunately not as simple as adding some media queries. This lesson introduces the `viewBox` attribute, which is used to control how SVGs scale. We’ll also examine a reusable function that can be used to make nearly any visualization responsive.

Make D3 v4 Charts Responsive with the viewBox attribute

Applications are driven by state. Many things, like the user interface, should always be consistent with that state.
[MobX](https://mobxjs.github.io/mobx) is a general purpose FRP library that provides the means to derive, for example, a React based user interface automatically from the state and keep it synchronized.

The net result of this approach is that writing applications becomes really straight-forward and boilerplate free.

Sync the UI with the app state using MobX observable and observer in React

This lesson explains how you can build larger trees of react component and how they are managed efficiently by MobX. You will learn how to pass observable data structures around in props and how the Devtools can be used to analyze the performance of your UI.

Pass observable data through props in MobX

This lesson explains how actions can be used to control and modify the state of your application. They help you to structure your code base and integrate well with the MobX React Devtools. Actions automatically create transactions, which group changes together.

Use MobX actions to change and guard state

Derivations form the backbone of MobX and come in two flavors: computed values are values that can be derived from the state automatically. And reactions can be used to manage side effects, such as drawing the user interface. In this lesson you will learn how these concepts relate to each other and how they are optimized automatically by MobX.

Derive computed values and manage side effects with MobX reactions

In D3, the General Update Pattern is the name given to what happens when a data join is followed by operations on the enter, update, and exit selections. When a chart's data changes over time and each update can both create new elements and destroy existing ones, the General Update pattern can help convey meaning to users. This lesson demonstrates the pattern using animated transitions on a column chart.

Animate with the General Update Pattern in D3 v4

In this lesson we will finally do something useful with our temperatures. We extend it into a small app in which users can enter a location, which is used as input for an external API to fetch weather data. In the mean time MobX keeps our UI in sync with the current state of the request.

Handle user input and asynchronous actions with MobX

Passing down stores through each layer of components can be a tedious job. This lesson demonstrates how Provider can be used to automatically connect observer based components to stores, by leveraging React's context mechanism in the background.

Connect MobX observer components to the store with the React Provider

So far we have been talking briefly about reactions. In this lesson you will learn how reactions can be used to observe state until some condition is met. After that you will see how autorun can be used to automatically trigger side effects. This is used internally by observer as well. We will test this by replacing React with our own handcrafted rendering which is still kept in sync with the state by MobX!

Write custom MobX reactions with when and autorun

Ensuring your charts are responsive is essential if you want them to work regardless of the user's device and screen size. In this lesson we'll learn how the viewBox attribute of SVG elements works, and apply that knowledge to make a future-proof D3 chart.

Responsive D3 charts with the viewBox attribute

Since D3 outputs standard markup, you can use familiar dev tools and inspectors to debug your visualizations. In this lesson we’ll look at how to use Chrome Dev Tools to examine the data associated with your generated markup and experiment with styles to speed up the development process.

Debug D3 v4 with Dev Tools

D3 makes it easy to add meaningful animations to your data visualizations. Whether it’s fading in new items or tweening existing shapes to display new values, adding transitions is easy. This lesson shows you how to add animations while building on your existing knowledge of D3 selections.

Animate Transitions in D3 v4

Create a line chart, then easily convert it to an area chart

Line and Area Charts with D3

Sometimes you'll be looking for a string, but won't know which file it's in; or you'll want to find all usages of it within a directory. Learn how to use grep -r to recursively search all the files in a directory. 

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