Learn React Hooks: Build and refactor modern React.js applications using Hooks 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

Loving this book so far! Just finished chapter 5 of the book and I have to say I have gain lots of practical and insightful knowledge of React and Javascript in general.Highly recommend this book if you are have some familiarity with React or a beginner of the library. If you follow the author through his examples you should be fine, but if you don’t follow along you may get lost, it is a lot of content that he covers in chapters 1-5.

I was excited to see this book since I am really very interested to learn and understand React Hooks. First, I will preface this by stating that this is an advanced book. Newbies, and even intermediate users should avoid this book.The book starts off great. You learn some basic concepts about hooks, then you slowly build an app. As you progress through the book, the app gets refactored to use React Hooks. The book does a particularly good job discussing the useState hook.Chapter 3 is where I started to run into trouble, and by chapter 4 I was completely lost. The book requires you to build on the app from previous chapters. That is fine, but starting around Chapter 3, the author provides the code to enter but does not tell you where to put it. This resulted in a lot of trial and error. I used the downloadable code to figure it out, but the downloadable code is the completed version of the chapter. This means I had to dig through the downloadable code for the section of the chapter I'm reading while avoiding the new code that would be added in later sections. I could chalk this up to my own limitations, but it still made for a frustrating experience.By Chapter 4, it felt like I was just typing in code without understanding what I was doing. I will admit that I'm not a Javascript/React guru, but I felt like I needed to be one in order to get through this book. I gave up at Chapter 5.Overall, this book has potential, but it falls short. It's difficult to follow and makes many assumptions about the reader's skillset. After four chapters, I understand how to use a hook (syntax-wise), but I'm still unclear on the when and why, though the author does make a quick attempt to explain it.However, its flaws could be fixed in a 2nd Edition, and I would give it another chance. Also, the author does a lot of cool stuff with Javascript; I learned some Javascript techniques that were unrelated to hooks, so that was a pleasant benefit.Lastly, kudos to the author for writing a book on such a cutting-edge concept.

I've read probably 10-15 react books at this point and I'd have to say in terms of theory/conceptual understanding this book is probably the best I've read when it comes to react hooks vs react class-based components.The book is very well written and the first few chapters are reasonably forgiving to newer react developers and even provide the reader with an under-the-hood understanding of useState for example by basically creating it from scratch.The one downside is it seems to be intended for people who have already finished a few react applications and are now tasked with evaluating components and possibly refactoring class-based components to react hooks. So, personally I would recommend it to mid to senior-level developers or very advanced beginners.

But I really wish the author could publish errata. Starting Page 74, one can see some obvious errors as the app would crash. Comparing with the example code on the Github, they are very different. Chapter 5 were even worse, a lot of steps were omitted. One has to compare with the example code to see what's really going on.