Fluent React

Chapter 11. Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for joining me on this journey through the React ecosystem. I hope you’ve enjoyed this adventure as much as I have. In our time together, we pursued a deeper understanding of React, exploring its core principles, inner workings, and broader ecosystem. Assuming we already know how to use React, we focused on understanding its mechanism: how it actually works—with the end goal being practical takeaways we can use in our engineering careers going forward.

Takeaways

Let’s outline some of those takeaways now:

Rethink best practices.

Sometimes, we need to rethink everything. React’s introduction of JSX and the virtual DOM was a radical departure from the status quo. It challenged the established conventions and forced us to rethink how we build interfaces. This willingness to challenge the status quo and reimagine the way things are done is a hallmark of React’s philosophy, and thus as engineers, we should always be willing to challenge the status quo and rethink the way things are done.

Fully understand how JSX works.

If we’re limited by a programming language—as in, if we can’t have HTML-style syntax in JavaScript—we as engineers have the power to change that by creating a new language. This is what JSX is: a new language that compiles down to JavaScript. We can do this too now that we fully understand how JSX works and some compiler theory.

Constraints are not a bad thing.

Constraints are the mother of invention. ...