Taming the State in React

by Robin Wieruch

The book dives deeply into state management in React. You will learn everything about React's local state and state management with Redux and MobX. It comes with a lot of best practices, techniques and concepts. Along the way you will have practical hands on experiences by building own applications.The book turned out to exceed all my expectations. What started as an attempt to write a introductory book about state management in React with Redux, turned out into a full blown 250-page book which showcases MobX as alternative state management library, implements exciting applications along the way and has boilerplate projects to get you started in learning and building applications with these libraries.The bigger idea was to write a book which gives learners a consistent way to study the topic state management. I had the feeling that there exist way too many, partly inconsistent or outdated, tutorials around these topics and it is hard for learners to choose from so many opportunities. I thought, one well structured book should help newcomers to get started easily in the topic of state management with React's local state, Redux and MobX. Afterward, everyone should be on one well set level to build his/her own applications with Redux or MobX.The book teaches you how to use local state in React and scaling React applications with advanced practices, patterns and techniques. Afterward, the ebook dives into learning Redux and MobX as libraries for state management. These libraries are taught from scratch without React but in combination with React later on. However, all these learnings are not necessarily bound to React as view layer library. They can be applied in other view layer (component based) libraries, such as Vue.js, or single page application (SPA) frameworks, such as Angular.js, too. If you are new to React and want to learn React before, I recommend you to read the up to date book The Road to learn React.Due to Redux's popularity, the book teaches more about Redux than MobX. But it is planned to grow the MobX part too, because I am really into that library as well. For both state management libraries, Redux and MobX, you will learn to use them standalone, to connect them to React applications in multiple ways, and to apply best practices, patterns and tricks to scale them in larger applications. You will learn about using JavaScript ES6 to keep your state immutable, middleware in Redux, and flat and normalized state structures. Afterward, the terms actions, reducers, store(s), connected components and so on, will not be foreign subjects to you anymore.After reading the book, I believe you are ready to build your own applications in any (view layer) library or SPA framework of your choice with Redux or MobX. But when using React, you are setup with advanced knowledge about React's local state to use it in larger applications.

Genres: Technology, Programming

265 pages, ebook

Published September 1, 2017

About the author

Robin Wieruch is a german software engineer and freelancer located in Berlin. In the recent years he has gained experiences in single page applications which use Ember, Angular and React. He is a full-time JavaScript developer, is doing his best to teach students on his blog and strives to learn something new every day himself.

Reviews

[Sina]

Great book. For newcomers to intermediates. It provides a lot of examples and practices. All of them working perfectly. Besides that, it also introduces a learning path for advance readers.

[Stefano Zanella · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking for a book that would go beyond the “how to” of specific libraries and talk about larger scale state management and architectural patterns in React applications. I didn’t find this here, and my doubts on how to make sure a complex view layer (not just a component) remains agnostic to state management and to the connection with a backend still remain.
This book is a good introduction to Redux, with a few ancillary pointers to other alternatives (like MobX) and supporting libraries (like normalizr). It also offers a way to understand when to use local state and when to switch to global state management. But apart from that it doesn’t go much beyond what you could read from the official documentation. There’s a lot of mentioning a “scaling application” but I find the usage of this term so generic that it offers close to no guidance.
The book would have been more interesting if some not-so-common topics would have been explained in more depth, but for the most part they were only touched upon lightly.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think a single book can do all of this well, lest for it to become endless and potentially unreadable. But at the same time I think this book lacked a clear identity that would have helped to better select its readers.

[Juan Sierra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading content of Robin almost 3 months ago. Already finished The Road to React and this book and i have to say that he does a great job explaining the fundamentals concepts of these technologies. I agree that it's not an advanced guide but it was exactly what i was looking for. I worked with Redux already in more than one project, but never took the time to really grasp the concepts and understand how to do certain things, best practices and more. His teaching style is really easy to follow even for a non native english speaker like me.
I put 4 stars because some sections need to be updated, but i know it's hard to mantain all the content updated keeping in mind on how fast the technologies change.

[Fran · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book gives a good description about the React+Redux basics, but I was waiting for something more advanced. At least I learnt Mobx.

[Oluwasanmi Kayode]

Good