React Cookbook

Preface

This book contains a collection of code that we’ve found helpful over several years of building React applications. Like recipes you would use in the kitchen, we’ve designed them to be starting points or inspirations for your own code. You should adjust them to match your situation and replace any ingredients (such as example servers) with those that seem more appropriate for your needs. The recipes range from general web development tips to larger pieces of code that you could generalize into libraries.

Most of the recipes are built with Create React App, as this is now the common starting point for most React projects. It should be straightforward to convert each recipe for use in Preact or Gatsby.

To keep the code compact, we have generally used hooks and functions rather than class components. We have also used the Prettier tool to apply standard code formatting throughout. We have used Prettier’s default options, other than narrower indents and line lengths, to fit the code neatly onto the printed page. You should adjust the code format to match your preferred standard.

We have used many libraries in the creation of these recipes:

Tool/library	Description	Versions
Apollo Client	GraphQL client	3.3.19
axios	HTTP library	0.21.1
chai	Unit test support library	4.3.0
chromedriver	Browser automation tool	88.0.0
Create React App	Tool for generating React apps	4.0.3
Cypress	Automated test system	7.3.0
Cypress Axe	Automated accessibility testing	0.12.2