Learning React

Chapter 1. Welcome to React

React is a popular library used to create user interfaces. It was built at Facebook to address some of the challenges associated with large-scale, data-driven websites. When React was released in 2013, the project was initially viewed with some skepticism because the conventions of React are quite unique.

In an attempt to not intimidate new users, the core React team wrote an article called “Why React?” that recommended that you “Give It [React] Five Minutes.” They wanted to encourage people to work with React first before thinking that their approach was too crazy.

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. And yes, those tags require preprocessing to run in a browser. And you’ll probably need a build tool like webpack for that. Give it five minutes.

If you read that article—as we did—you may have been dazzled by the promise of a new JavaScript library—a library that would solve all of our problems with the DOM; a library that would always be easy to work with and would never hurt us.

Then the questions start to arise: how do I convert this JSX? How do I load data? Where does the CSS go? What is declarative programming? Every path leads to more questions about how to incorporate this library in your actual day to day work. Every conversation introduces new terminology, new techniques, ...