Prerequisites

System Requirements

All of these must be available in your PATH. To verify things are set up
properly, you can run this:

git --version
node --version
npm --version

If you have trouble with any of these, learn more about the PATH environment
variable and how to fix it here for [windows][win-path] or
[mac/linux][mac-path].

Setup

After you've made sure to have the correct things (and versions) installed, you
should be able to just run a few commands to get set up:

git clone https://github.com/kentcdodds/advanced-react-patterns.git
cd advanced-react-patterns
npm run setup --silent

This may take a few minutes. It will ask you for your email. This is
optional and just automatically adds your email to the links in the project to
make filling out some forms easier.

If you get any errors, please read through them and see if you can find out what
the problem is. If you can't work it out on your own then please [file an
issue][issue] and provide all the output from the commands you ran (even if
it's a lot).

Running the app

To get the app up and running (and really see if it worked), run:

npm start

This should start up your browser. If you're familiar, this is a standard
react-scripts application.

You can also open
the deployment of the app on Netlify.

Running the tests

npm test

This will start Jest in watch mode. Read the output and
play around with it. The tests are there to help you reach the final version,
however sometimes you can accomplish the task and the tests still fail if you
implement things differently than I do in my solution, so don't look to them as
a complete authority.

Exercises

  • src/exercise/00.md: Background, Exercise Instructions, Extra Credit
  • src/exercise/00.js: Exercise with Emoji helpers
  • src/__tests__/00.js: Tests
  • src/final/00.js: Final version
  • src/final/00.extra-0.js: Final version of extra credit

The purpose of the exercise is not for you to work through all the material.
It's intended to get your brain thinking about the right questions to ask me as
I walk through the material.

Helpful Emoji 🐨 💪 🏁 💰 💯 🦉 📜 💣 👨‍💼 🚨

Each exercise has comments in it to help you get through the exercise. These fun
emoji characters are here to help you.

  • Kody the Koala 🐨 will tell you when there's something specific you should
    do
  • Matthew the Muscle 💪 will indicate what you're working with an exercise
  • Chuck the Checkered Flag 🏁 will indicate that you're working with a final
    version
  • Marty the Money Bag 💰 will give you specific tips (and sometimes code)
    along the way
  • Hannah the Hundred 💯 will give you extra challenges you can do if you
    finish the exercises early.
  • Olivia the Owl 🦉 will give you useful tidbits/best practice notes and a
    link for elaboration and feedback.
  • Dominic the Document 📜 will give you links to useful documentation
  • Berry the Bomb 💣 will be hanging around anywhere you need to blow stuff
    up (delete code)
  • Peter the Product Manager 👨‍💼 helps us know what our users want
  • Alfred the Alert 🚨 will occasionally show up in the test failures with
    potential explanations for why the tests are failing.

Workshop Feedback

Each exercise has an Elaboration and Feedback link. Please fill that out after
the exercise and instruction.

At the end of the workshop, please go to this URL to give overall feedback.
Thank you! https://kcd.im/arp-ws-feedback

Transcript

Kent C. Dodds: 0:00 Have you ever made a custom component? The custom component is basically an abstraction. Every time we make abstractions, I feel like it's really easy for that abstraction to run away with us. It can be difficult to keep control of that abstraction and avoid a bunch of different use cases piling on to it.

0:22 The patterns that we're going to be talking about in this workshop, Advanced React Patterns, are methods that you can use to improve the flexibility and simplicity of the components and abstractions that you create.

0:36 I'm really excited to share this with you. I learned a lot of these abstractions through building Downshift JS. Also, in looking at other libraries that have implemented many of these patterns as well.

0:48 In each one of these exercises, you'll see a link to a different library that implements the pattern, or some source code, or something that should give you an idea of how does this pattern really look in real life.

1:01 If you haven't run into the problems that these patterns are intended to help alleviate, then it might be a little bit difficult for you to wrap your head around the pattern itself, but I do promise you, it will click. Keep on working through it and take a look at some of those examples that I showed you.

1:17 Let's go ahead and take a look at the repo and get you all set up and ready to go. It's the Advanced React Patterns workshop here. You'll scroll down to the setup, copy and paste this, get it up, and rolling. Once you have that up and running, then you'll have your exercises directory where you're going to be hanging out.

1:35 Let's take a look at the repo or the application. Here we have context module functions. This cool little trick that I learned from Dan Abramov. He says this is what they do at Facebook. There's actually some open source code that I link it to show you what Facebook does in the DevTools. It's pretty cool.

1:55 Then compound components. Love this. We're going to be hanging out with this toggle component quite a bit in this workshop. The reason that we're using such a contrived example is, so that you don't get a bunch of distraction of a bunch of other things that you have to worry about as you're building these patterns into this toggle component. Completely over engineering the toggle component.

2:16 We will get into building this abstraction for something real world in the other workshop for building a React application. Here we're going to go with something a little contrived. Hopefully, you don't have any distractions in doing that.

2:30 We'll also get into flexible compound components. We'll do the same thing except with React context, and their use cases for both, that's why we have both. Then we have prop collections and getters. This is a fun one. State Reducer has a special place in my heart. I love state reducer. Control Props, also, just outrageously powerful.

2:50 Lots of cool things to look into here, I can' wait for you to experience this, and play around with some of these things. Build some awesome abstractions using these patterns. Have a good time with this, and I'll see you on the other side of the workshop.