- Explain the topics this course will cover
- Describe this course's approach to React
- Briefly describe React
This course is an introduction to React.js, one of the most popular front-end libraries at the moment, with its own very active and extensive ecosystem. Many front-end engineers use React.js to create amazing applications, and you'll be a part of that group yourself in no time!
This course handles all the basic React stuff. We'll learn about JSX, props, state and how to structure our components. When we're done with all the lessons, you'll be able to create real applications with React, including fetching remote data and handling events.
This course assumes a working familiarity with JavaScript and HTML. The first section in this course will contain brief lessons on several core JavaScript techniques and paradigms that are widely used throughout React: the prevalence of functional programming, writing pure functions, fetching remote data, ... It's totally okay if you manage to fly through these lessons — they're supposed to be a refresher and not super challenging yet. You'll get to the good stuff in no time!
First of all, it's important to remember that React is a library, not a framework. There's a big difference: with tech like Angular (a framework), you can pretty much stick with just using Angular for the most part. React — a library — is a little different: it does only one thing, and it does it very well. React is focused on creating UI's. Think of it as a library to create your views and components.
The fact that it is a library also makes it simple: it doesn't have a huge API and is easy to grok. React encourages us to write small, laser-focused components that compose together in an elegant manner. Due to its declarative nature, we don't need to concern ourselves with manually feeding data through our components. When a prop or the state of a component changes, it automatically re-renders based on its new data.
You usually use a bunch of other tech that is built for (or on top of) React in your final application. We'll focus on only using React for now, since that is the most important part to get down!
