Chapter 1. Meet React
This chapter covers
- Introducing React
- Some of React’s high-level concepts and paradigms
- The virtual DOM
- Components in React
- React for teams
- Tradeoffs of using React
If you work as a web engineer in the tech industry, chances are you’ve heard of React. Maybe it was somewhere online like Twitter or Reddit. Maybe a friend or colleague mentioned it to you or you heard a talk about it at a meetup. Wherever it was, I bet that what you heard was probably either glowing or a bit skeptical. Most people tend to have a strong opinion about technologies like React. Influential and impactful technologies tend to generate that kind of response. For these technologies, often a smaller number of people initially “get it” before the technology catches on and moves to a broader audience. React started this way, but now enjoys immense popularity and use in the web engineering world. And it’s popular for good reason: it has a lot to offer and can reinvigorate, renew, or even transform how you think about and build user interfaces.
React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces across a variety of platforms. React gives you a powerful mental model to work with and helps you build user interfaces in a declarative and component-driven way. We’ll unpack these ideas and much more over the course of the book, but that’s what React is in the broadest, briefest sense.