Learning React, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1. Welcome to React

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

What makes a JavaScript library good? Is it the number of stars on GitHub? The number of downloads on npm? Is the number of posts that ThoughtLeaders™ write about it on a daily basis important? How do we pick the best tool to use to build the best thing? How do we know it’s worth our time? How do we know it’s good?

When React was first released in 2013, there was a lot of conversation around whether it was good, and there were many skeptics. It was new, and the new can often be upsetting.

To respond to these critiques, Pete Hunt from the React team wrote an article called “Why React?” that recommended that you “give it [React] five minutes.” He wanted to encourage people to work with React first before deciding that the team’s approach was too wild.

Yes, React is a small library that doesn’t come with everything you might need out of the box to build your application. Give it five minutes.

Yes, in React, you write code that looks like HTML right in your JavaScript ...