Chapter 11. Anti-Patterns to Be Avoided
With this book, you've learned how to apply best practices when writing a React application. In the first chapters we revisited the basic concepts to build a solid understanding, and then we took a leap into more advanced techniques in the following chapters.
You now should be able to build reusable components, make components communicate with each other, and optimize an application tree to get the best performance. However, developers make mistakes, and this chapter is all about the common anti-patterns we should avoid when using React.
Looking at common errors will help you to avoid them and will aid your understanding of how React works and how to build applications in the React way. For each problem, we will see an example that shows how to reproduce and solve it.
In this chapter we will cover the following points:
The scenarios where initializing the state using props leads to unexpected results
Why mutating the state is wrong and harmful for performance...
