So, You want to start a react project? Pt. 1
Today, I am in my last week of mod 4 in my bootcamp and I have been specifically focused on learning React. When we first started this journey, I remember seeing the mod 4 projects and being amazing. These were accomplished with the beauty of React.js. I have fallen in love with it and in this small series I am going to talk about what is react, why use it, and how to get started with a base project!
So let’s start with, “What is react??” React is a library rather than a framework (even though you will hear it referred to as a framework quite often). The reason is, is that you can add on other libraries to react to turn it into a fully functional framework. It was developed by Facebook as its solution to handle state management and also render that state to the DOM. This is the main focus of react and so you will often find yourself adding other libraries to React to add in functionality…think Routing, Redux, Icons….etc
Why would we want to use react? There are other frameworks out there for your frontend development needs, so why use React?
1) Designed to be easy to learn. If you have some basic background knowledge with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, then picking up React shouldn’t** be super difficult.
2) Flexibility: Learn Once, Write Everywhere. Once you have the basics down, you are able to build re-usable components(think containers, cards, buttons) for your website. This style of component based building leads to high end performance for your web apps! You can use React Native to build a native mobile app, use Gatsby for a static web page, and it was designed to be easily integrated into a website that was not using react!
3)Versioning and updates: To me, this is one of the most important. It has the backing of facebook that continually pushes out updates to the library. The documentation provided is extraordinary to help guide you through any problems. They even include a dedicated blog for react.js on the homepage.
I think thats enough with the introduction! In the next part I will start going into how to start up a small project and focus on the parts of React that make React, React!