June 2020
Intermediate to advanced
310 pages
6h 51m
English
Content preview from Learning React, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 4. How React Works
So far on your journey, you’ve brushed up on the latest syntax. You’ve reviewed the functional programming patterns that guided React’s creation. These steps have prepared you to take the next step, to do what you came here to do: to learn how React works. Let’s get into writing some real React code.
When you work with React, it’s more than likely that you’ll be creating your apps with JSX. JSX is a tag-based JavaScript syntax that looks a lot like HTML. It’s a syntax we’ll dive deep into in the next chapter and continue to use for the rest of the book. To truly understand React, though, we need to understand its most atomic units: React elements. From there, we’ll get into React elements. From there, we’ll get into React components by looking at how we can create custom components that compose other components and elements.
Page Setup
In order to work with React in the browser, we need to include two libraries: React and ReactDOM. React is the library for creating views. ReactDOM is the library used to actually render the UI in the browser. Both libraries are available as scripts from the unpkg CDN (links are included in the following code). Let’s set up an HTML document:
<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><metacharset="utf-8"/><title>React Samples</title></head><body><!-- Target container --><divid="root"></div><!-- React library & ReactDOM (Development Version)--><scriptsrc="https://unpkg.com/react@16/umd/react.development.js"></script>
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