Who Should Read This Book

You are already familiar with programming and JavaScript in particular. This book assumes you are tackling common software design choices that arise when building native applications. You may be working in your garage on the next great social media platform, or turning a lumbering enterprise system into a zippy mobile experience. If you’re trying to bring a cross-platform native application to market quickly and have chosen React, this book is for you. Every section of the book is rooted in personal experiences building native applications.

Why I Wrote This Book

There is a ton of information online about React Native: the documentation is plentiful, and between StackOverflow and the React Native issues on GitHub, you will be able to solve most discrete programming problems. This book tries to go a little deeper: how do you organize a project? How can you design a user experience that accounts for asking users for permission to use their camera? These are common questions that require some thought and don’t necessarily have one solution. This is a cookbook: the recipes should provide a great starting point. Let them inspire you to come up with your own solutions, or produce something when you’re in a pinch!

A Word on JavaScript Today

It feels like every week JavaScript reinvents itself with a new name, a new set of language features, and new transpilers and compilers! Whether you call it ECMAScript, ES6, ES6+, or find yourself transpiling from TypeScript, CoffeeScript, NativeScript, Flow, Elm, or Reason, the ultimate output runs on a JavaScript virtual machine. JavaScript fatigue is real: with so much movement, how do you stay focused on a stable set of technologies?

There is no right answer. Know that all of these tools are simply trying to make you, the software developer, more productive. If these conditions are satisfied, then you should sleep well at night knowing that when the next wave crashes, you will be in the company of a supportive open source community preparing to catch the undercurrent. For the purposes of this book, I use the terms JavaScript and ES6 interchangeably. In the final section, I challenge you to embrace this shifting landscape by studying how the same component written in ES6 can be rewritten with Reason, a functional programming language built on top of OCaml!

Navigating This Book

This book is organized into six chapters:

• Chapter 1 discusses JavaScript tools and how they work with React Native.

• Chapter 2 explores the React Native ecosystem: how you leverage what is available and how to bring it into your project.

• Chapters 3 and 4 go into some common challenges seen in most applications: handling application state, dealing with device I/O, and structuring your design assets.

• Chapter 5 describes the deployment process and some techniques for reducing your delivery time.

• Chapter 6 tackles writing maintainable code: making code reusable, portable, self-documenting, and adding tools that catch bugs before your customers do.

Like any cookbook, it’s best to flip through the examples and see how they connect with the work you are trying to accomplish. If you are already familiar with React Native or feel at home with Node, NPM, and Yarn, I suggest skipping Chapter 2. If you have already written native applications, then Chapter 1 is probably worth flipping through.

Online Resources

React Native relies on a suite of tools that can be loosely grouped into three categories: JavaScript tools, Apple SDKs, and Android SDKs. React Native bundles all your code into a JavaScript bundle that then runs on the native platform (for example, Android or iOS). Ensure these native platforms are installed correctly by following the React Native Getting Started guide.

If you have no experience with React, the React Overview should help you stay oriented. I recommend looking through some of these references before starting this book. This list touches on a collection of technologies that underpin much of the React Native developer experience, including JavaScript/ES6, NPM, React, React Native, and Redux:

• The definitive guide: React Native: Getting Started

• A quick primer on the transpiler powering our JavaScript pipeline: Learn ES2015

• A great introduction to the Node Package Manager (NPM): What is npm?

• An excellent and concise explanation of React: React Overview

• A community directory of all things React Native: Awesome React Native

• Free video tutorials discussing state management by the creator of Redux: Getting Started with Redux

• A curated directory of React Native packages: Opinionated catalog of Open Source React Native packages

• A listing of React Native packages available via NPM: An open catalog of React Native libraries

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to all the reviewers of this book: Spencer Carli, Matt Hamil, and Arnar Þór Sveinsson. Their insights and technical feedback on a fast-changing ecosystem gave me added confidence in the material included in this book. I take full responsibility for the content of the book, but it would have been much less readable without their suggestions.

This book would not have been possible without the Paradem team, particularly my cofounder Kevin Pratt, who made it possible for me to focus on writing. I am also grateful to Ezra Hopkins, Scott Luetke, and Abdullah Norozi, who were on hand as I was working through the chapters. Scott Schaffter and Jay Perry at Bivee Inc. provided me with the inspiration and encouragement to keep writing. Thank you O’Reilly Media, and particularly Nan Barber, for offering feedback and guiding the publishing process.

I would like to thank Facebook for sharing React Native with the world. I am also grateful to the folks in the Reactiflux Discord server for offering tech support, particularly with Reason. I am most thankful to all the individuals and organizations who are contributing their knowledge and source code with the open source community.

Lastly, I wish to thank my loving wife, Tara, for cheering me on and providing thoughtful insights.