4 Crucial React Tips

React is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces, and it offers a lot of flexibility and power for building complex and interactive web applications. Here are some tips and tricks for working with React that can help you improve your applications and make your development process more efficient.

1. Use functional components whenever possible

React offers two ways to define components: class-based components and functional components. Class-based components have a lot of features, such as local state and lifecycle methods, but they can also be more verbose and harder to understand than functional components.

Functional components, on the other hand, are simple JavaScript functions that take props as an argument and return a React element. They don’t have local state or lifecycle methods, but they can still be used for a wide range of components, from simple presentational components to complex stateful components.

Because of their simplicity and ease of use, it’s generally a good idea to use functional components whenever possible. This will make your codebase easier to read and maintain, and it can also make your application more performant because functional components are easier for React to optimize.

2. Use the useState and useEffect hooks

React 16.8 introduced the concept of hooks, which are functions that allow you to add React features to functional components. The two most commonly used hooks are useState and useEffect.

useState is a hook that allows you to add local state to a functional component. It takes a single argument, which is the initial value of the state, and it returns an array with two elements: the current state value and a function for updating the state.

const [count, setCount] = useState(0);

useEffect is a hook that allows you to perform side effects in functional components. It takes a callback function that is called after the component is rendered, and it can be used for tasks such as fetching data from an API or subscribing to a event listener.

useEffect(() => {
    // perform side effects
}, [dependencies]);