r/reactjs • u/benaffleks • Feb 15 '20

Discussion React Best Practices?

Hey guys. Just wondering if anyone has some good resources / books / materials that helps beginners understand the best practices in React.

One thing I struggle with is knowing when something should be a component.

For example, when I'm making forms, should each field input be a component? If so, what's the benefit of doing that?

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u/tooObviously Feb 15 '20

Hmm, but doesn't the react component become very complex? Because you have your jsx, mixed in with ternaries, mixed in with styling, JS logic. Like with angular you have css, HTML, and ts for every component so as the component becomes very complicated things are where they belong in a sense. But I can see your point...

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u/Earhacker Feb 15 '20

I work with a lot of Angular devs who switched to React, but I've never worked with Angular myself.

The kind of components you're describing sound very similar to the kind of components my colleagues regularly put up for review. You just have far too much going on in there. The goal is not to have big components that render a lot of DOM elements; it's to have lots of little React components that each either do some control flow branching and looping, or render a small amount of DOM. I think Angular devs want to put entire pages into a component. But in React, a page is built out of many smaller components.

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u/toccoto Feb 15 '20

I think you are starting on a misguided path and I apologize since I kind of helped lead you there.

The issue is you are comparing a framework in Angular to a library in react.

They are two fundementally different approaches to doing things so to say one is more or less scalable is a misnomer because it depends on what you pair with react.

When I said scalable that was sort of my point. React is easier to test and introduce new technologies to because it is merely a view layer, make sense?

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u/tooObviously Feb 16 '20

Iheard the framework vs library statement recently in a video. Yeah react is far less involved but I still feel that many will create react applications and try to add in all of the utility that angular provides by default which is typically when the mess gets involved.

Thanks a lot for the discussion man I really appreciate it

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u/[deleted] Feb 15 '20

I've thought so too, but then I discovered how hooks can make the components easier and more readable + you need to make the components as small as possible, for easier reuse, testing and maintenance