MobX Quick Start Guide

Apply functional Reactive programming for simple and scalable state management with MobX

Key Features:

- The easiest way to learn MobX to enhance your client-side state-management

- Understand how the concepts and components fit together

- Work through different state management scenarios with MobX

Book Description:

MobX is a simple and highly scalable state management library in JavaScript. Its abstractions can help you manage state in small to extremely large applications. However, if you are just starting out, it is essential to have a guide that can help you take the first steps. This book aims to be that guide that will equip you with the skills needed to use MobX and effectively handle the state management aspects of your application.

You will first learn about observables, actions, and reactions: the core concepts of MobX. To see how MobX really shines and simplifies state management, you'll work through some real-world use cases. Building on these core concepts and use cases, you will learn about advanced MobX, its APIs, and libraries that extend MobX.

By the end of this book, you will not only have a solid conceptual understanding of MobX, but also practical experience. You will gain the confidence to tackle many of the common state management problems in your own projects.

What You Will Learn:

- Explore the fundamental concepts of MobX, such as observables, actions, and reactions

- Use observables to track state and react to its changes with validations and visual feedback (via React Components)

- Create a MobX observable from different data types

- Define form data as an observable state and tackle sync and async form validations

- Use the special APIs to directly manipulate observables, tracking its changes, and discovering the reasons behind a change

- Tackle any state management issue you may have in your app by combining mobx-utils and mobx-state-tree

- Explore the internals of the MobX reactive system by diving into its inner workings

Who this book is for:

This book is for web developers who want to implement easy and scalable state management for their apps. Knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is assumed

Table of Contents

- Introduction to State Management

- Observables, Actions, and Reactions

- A React App with MobX

- Crafting the Observable tree

- Derivations, Actions and Reactions

- Handling Real-World Use Cases

- Special API for Special Cases

- Exploring mobx-utils and mobx-state-tree

- Mobx Internals

Pavan Podila has been building frontend applications since 2001 and has used a variety of tools, technologies, and platforms, from Java Swing, WPF with .Net/C#, Cocoa on macOS and iOS, to the web platform with frameworks like React and Angular. He has been working with React since 2013 and MobX since 2016. He is a colead of the Interactive Practice at Publicis.Sapient, where he builds large financial apps for web and mobile platforms. Earlier, he was a Microsoft MVP for client application development (2008-2011), a published author of WPF Control Development Unleashed (Addison-Wesley). He created QuickLens, a Mac App for UI designers/developers, and authored several articles and video courses on Tuts+. Pavan is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for web technologies and currently authors courses on The UI Dev. He is a regular speaker at meetups, conferences, and workshops. When time permits, you can find him sketching on iPad or playing Ping-Pong.

Michel Weststrate (Msc) is tech lead and open source evangelist at Mendix. He has been active as both a frontend and backend developer in different stacks. An occasional speaker at software conferences, he has authored video courses on egghead. Intrigued by several (transparent) reactive programming libraries, he researched and worked on making the ReactJS framework more reactive while addressing predictability and maintainability constraints in other solutions. This led to mobservable (nowadays MobX), which was quickly adopted at Mendix. He's very active in the open source software community, and he authored MobX, Immer, and several small libraries, and coauthored MobX-state-tree.