Introduction to React

React is an open-source, frontend Javascript library for building user Interfaces or UI components. It is maintained by Facebook. React can be used as a base in the development of single-page or mobile application. ReactJS offers graceful solutions to some of front-end programming’s most persistent issues, allowing you to build dynamic and interactive web applications with ease. It’s fast, scalable, flexible, powerful, and has a robust developer community that’s rapidly growing.

Features of React

• JSX JavaScript syntax extension
• Virtual DOM
• One way data binding
• extensions
• debugging

Some advantages of React include, use of the virtual DOM which is a JavaScript object. This will improve applications performance, since JavaScript virtual dom is faster than the regular DOM. React can be used on client and server side aw well as with other frameworks. Component and data patterns improve readability, which help to maintain larger apps.

React does have its limitations. React covers only the view layer of the application, hence you still need to choose other technologies to get a complete tooling set for development.

What learning material is available?

My favorite starting point to learn new technologies is reading the official documentation. This is not something that I’d suggest to everyone, especially more inexperienced developers. React’s documentation is very well written and easy to understand. If you prefer learning new technologies through their official documentation, React will make it a breeze for you like me. For many people, online courses are a great way to learn, and luckily for React, it’s easy to find great courses. There are many highly-rated courses by great instructors on Udemy, edx, and other online course websites.