An Overview of React Hooks

The introduction of React as a front-end development library for building interfaces to the developer ecosystem was a thing of joy, react made developing applications faster and easier as compared to other frameworks and libraries that were available at the time. Many developers and companies started making use of React to build great applications, as with software, the developers always sort ways to improve their application and add more features, react at the time made use of class components and different lifecycle methods to manage state and side effects. As more features were added to applications, the code used to build them became more cumbersome and difficult to maintain which caused lots of nightmares to developers.

In a bid to solve these problems, the React team introduced React Hooks. In this article, you will learn about React Hooks, the benefits/importance of React Hooks and the types of React Hooks.

What are React Hooks

React Hooks are features in React that make it possible to easily manage state and other side effects in a functional component. (side effects refer to actions that are not directly related to rendering a user interface examples include: fetching data from external APIs, subscribing to events etc).

React Hooks were introduced in React version 16.8 and since their introduction, they have made building React applications easier. According to (sst. dev), react hooks makes it possible for functional components to “hook” into React’s lifecycle and state.

Benefits/Importance of React Hooks:

The importance of react hooks cannot be overemphasized, they have made the building of applications easier. Kindly find below some benefits/importance of React Hooks:

1. It makes it easy to maintain applications: React hooks encourage the adoption of the functional programming pattern and make it possible to easily maintain components and in general, web applications.

2. Simpler Code: React hooks makes it possible to write codes that are easy to understand and straight to the point.

3. It makes it possible to reuse logic: With the availability of custom hooks, logic within a react component can easily be reused.

4. Improved State Management: React Hooks make it possible to easily manage states within a React application, with the use of hooks such as use state and use reducer, states within components can easily be managed and updated.

5. It allows code within applications to be easily tested.

React Hook Rules

These are rules that govern the usage of React hooks, they make sure that the usage of React hooks is not abused. When these rules are not properly followed, they may result in errors when developing a react application. Kindly find some of the React hook rules below:

1. React hooks should only be used in functional components

2. React Hooks should only be called at the top level of a functional component, they should not be called within nested functions, loops or conditions such as If statements.

Types of React Hooks

There are different types of react hooks and they are:

1. State Hooks: These are hooks that are used to manage the state of a component, they are:

   useState Hook

   useEffect Hook

2. Effect Hooks: These are hooks that are used to manage side effects in a react component, they are:

   UseEffect hook

   UseLayOutEffect hook

3. Context Hook: This is a hook that is used to manage global states in a react application, an example is useContext hook

4. Memoization Hook: This is a hook that is used to cache a value therefore, preventing a recalculation of such value on the next render, an example is the useMemo hook.

5. CallBack Hook: This is a hook that is used to cache callback functions, therefore, preventing them from being recreated on the next render, an example is the useCallBack hook

6. Debugging hook: This is a hook that aids in debugging a react application, an example is the useDebugValue hook.

Note: The callback and memorization hooks help to improve the performance of react applications.

Conclusion

React hooks are powerful features that help to make the development of React applications easier and less cumbersome. In this article, we were able to learn about React hooks, its benefits, types and the rules that govern it.