React v0.14.4 is out, Functional Components vs. Stateless Functional Components vs. Stateless Components, and using ES7 decorators with Babel 6
Hi Friends!
I know it's been a while since you've seen an issue from us and we're pretty bummed about that. We come bearing good news though. Up until this point we've been pretty in Flux, but we finally feel like we've found a platform that will allow us to more easily bring you great content. We're heading into 2016 excited and our enthusiasm is immutable.
If you ever have any ideas on how the newsletter can be improved, feel free to dispatch an action our way.
Vocabulary is hard, but it's also necessary to be able to clearly and efficiently discuss programming topics. In this post, Tyler McGinnis walks through the differences between Functional, Stateless Functional, and Stateless Components in React and why you should be careful with your verbiage.
Do you know the difference between a Component, an Element, and an Instance in React? We didn't - but now we do. In this article Dan does what he does best in demystifying these three common vocab words in React.
Babel 6 came with a lot of breaking changes to how a lot developers were making use of it, which you may have noticed if you were using ES7 decorator syntax. Decorators come in handy when using React, and are supported in some popular React libraries. In this post Josh Habdas shows us how to implement decorators the same way we did with Babel 5 while using Babel 6.
Everyone loves a good tutorial that takes you from zero to hero. This tutorial by Clay Allsopp does just that. Clay will walk you through building a Hacker News Client leveraging GraphQL and Relay.
The Siphon team shows us how to build a real time chat application with Siphon. Siphon is a tool that lets you build React Native applications without having to use Xcode.
Getting started with React is a bit trickier than you might expect, and a lot of the starter kits out there aren't focused on newcomers. Ean Platter's starter kit is curated for beginners, and includes a walk-through of the existing code so you don't end up using code you don't understand.
React-Native-Watch includes a demo iOS app with React Native bindings to communicate with iOS WatchKit apps. React Native on an Apple Watch, the future is bright.
Written by React Router co-author Michael Jackson, expect-element is an extension for expect that lets you write better assertions for DOM nodes.
React (with the combination of Redux and Immutablejs) have brought functional programming and immutability to the masses. Watch as Dan Abramov, Brian Lonsdorf, and the JavaScript Air Panel talk in depth about functional programming and why you should care. You might not know what a monad is, but that's ok.
If at this point you haven't taken a look at Redux, you should probably do that. Luckily Dan spent an entire month making these Redux videos that Egghead has made available for free. Even if you're comfortable with Redux, they'll still be worth your time to learn more about the internals of Redux as well as FP and Immutability.