By Dhanya Arumughom —

Learning ReactJS

What is ReactJS?

As you already know, JavaScript is the most popular programming languages used for front-end development of websites. There are a number of ways to organize your front-end JavaScript- frameworks like AngularJS, EmberJS, Bootstrap and libraries like jQuery, Glimmer, D3.js, the list goes on. They all ultimately help you build your web application much more easily.

ReactJS also called React.js or React is a JavaScript library developed for building User Interfaces. ReactJS allows users to create reusable UI components and create rich and engaging web applications efficiently with minimum code. The main objective of React is high performance by being fast and scalable and at the same time to be simple.

ReactJs focuses entirely on the ‘View’ layer in MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern which describes the user interaction part. So React processes only user interfaces of your web application. React was developed by Facebook.

Why ReactJS – Its features and benefits?

React is probably one of the most used JavaScript frameworks today. It is a great choice for creating advanced User Interfaces. It has become a choice of many front-end developers for its simplicity and speed. Here are a few features of React which makes it a good choice.
ReactJs is way simple to learn compared to frameworks like Angular or Ember which has steeper learning curves. Use of plain JavaScript, component based approach and well defined life cycles makes it much easier to grasp for developers. It also provides good documentation and has support of a strong community.

React is component based and is all about components. Instead of the traditional MVC, you have separation of components which allows developers to break down complex UI into simpler components. Components are the building blocks of your large web application. Each component has its own internal logic and decides how it should be rendered. This makes every component more intuitive and simple to update. It also makes code reuse possible.

ReactJS uses a declarative programming style which allows you to control flow and state in your application by just designing simple views for each state and declaring how it should look. It is just like saying “It should look like this”. React will do the job of efficiently updating and rendering the right components when your data changes. You don’t have to get bogged down in the implementation details of representing the state. This declarative style makes your code more predictable and easier to debug.

React provides a virtual DOM through React-DOM which is an abstraction of the HTML DOM. React creates an in-memory data structure cache which does the computation for changes and updates the browser. The virtual DOM acts as React’s local copy of the HTML DOM and allows React to do its computations within the virtual DOM and skip the real DOM operations which is often slow. This gives React tremendous flexibility and better performance.
React provides a unique syntax called JSX which allows you to combine HTML with JavaScript. JSX in fact is simple JavaScript which allows HTML quoting and uses HTML tag syntax to render components. JSX is just an option you have in React. You can write in pure JavaScript as well.

React implements a one way data flow which helps reduce the boilerplate and is much easier. This is achieved using an application architecture called Flux which controls the flow of data to components through a single control point called the dispatcher. This makes it easier to debug components of large React apps.

React can be used to build mobile apps for android and iOS using React Native. Another attraction is that for the mobile application, you will be able to use the same methodology and same architecture of the code you wrote in React for the web application. This is the reason why the makers of React call it ‘Learn once run anywhere’ library.

React can render on the server side using Node.
It can be combined with other JavaScript libraries or frameworks such as AngularJS.

Learn React

React is often referred to as the future of web development as ‘Web-componentization’ is believed to have a lot of importance in the future and React supports this. It helps to have better modularization and cleaner code saving time and money for huge projects. Many apps are built on ReactJs these days. The fact that tech giants like Facebook, Paypal, Instagram, Uber, etc use it for their UIs adds to the popularity and credibility of React. React is definitely a great library that any developer working with UI development would love to work with owing to its simplicity, flexibility and many other features. So get started!

Pre Requisites: Knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

Best Tutorials for ReactJS

We have collected a list of some of the best beginner level tutorials on ReactJS.

Best Courses For ReactJS

However, if you already decided to take a deep dive, here are some of the best courses we found on ReactJS.

For Intermediate Level

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