So I've been learning the react framework for a while now.
While watching a tutorial I encountered the useState hook and I was kind of confused cause I was not familiar with the functionality, I was familiar with only classes this.state and this.setState.
So I did my research and read through react's documentation and to my surprise, I found it pretty straightforward.

P.S Always read the documentation

Since I've been deliberating on what my next article would be based on I decided to write on my new-found knowledge.

What's React State Hook

According to react's documentation - A Hook is a special function that lets you “hook into” React features. For example, useState is a Hook that lets you add React state to function components.

A hook is like a key that gives you access to some functionalities and features of React.
Before the introduction of React's hook, you would have to use a class component in other to have access to React state. But with a hook, you can render a functional component and add a React state to it. To simply use useState you have to import it from React

import React, { useState } from 'react';

After importing the useState you have to declare a state variable and a function to update the state. The useState takes one argument which is the initial state, the value could be any data (e.g string, array, object, number). useState also returns a pair of values (i.e an array) which contains the state and a function that updates the state.

import React, { useState } from 'react';
const [state, updateState] = useState(initialState)

The syntax used is JavaScript's array destructuring, since useState returns two values we're assigning the values into distinct variables.

Read more about array destructuring

A Simple Application of useState

/* Let's say I have a function component in which I need to monitor the no of clicks or views on a post
*/
import React, { useState } from 'react';

const [clicks, updateClicks] = useState(0)
function () => {
return (
<div>
   <a href="" onClick={() => updateClicks(clicks + 1)}>Viewed {clicks} times</a>
</div>
)
}

So every time the link is clicked, updateClicks updates the no of clicks.

This was a short article.

For further reads check out React's Documentation

Thanks for reading 😃

Feel free to share your thoughts on React's state hook 🙂

I'm still learning 🤗