React and Getting Started with it

#react #javascript #frontend #firstpost

As a beginner some questions roll in our mind and they are :

What is React ?

React is an open-source, front end, JavaScript library for building User Interfaces or UI components. It is maintained by Facebook and a community of individual developers and companies.

JavaScript Library as it is about building JavaScript driven apps. React app runs in Browser so things happen instantly and don't have to wait for server response to get a new page.
User Interfaces are basically "What we see". And React is about using components for building things.

Why to use React ?

React is Flexible

Learn Once , Write Everywhere.

We can use react for Web Applications using React.js, Static sites using Gatsby, Mobile Applications using React Native, Desktop Applications using Electron and Server rendering using Next.js.

It provides great Developer Experience. It allows rapid development and API in react is simple to learn you would rarely look docs for it. Everything in React is a component which makes our code reusable.
Large number of people use React as compared to Angular and Vue and it is created and maintained by Facebook.

React has good performance as it uses Virtual DOM. Therefore, it allows ReactJS to know when exactly to re-render or when to ignore some specific pieces of DOM because it can detect when the data has changed.
React is easy to test and large number of testing frameworks are present.

React Library allows us to write HTML like syntax in JavaScript.

How we can create our first react app?

Step 1 :
Download and Install your preferred Text Editor. Some text editors which you can use are Sublime Text, Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, Webstorm.

Step 2 :

Local Development Environment
Install latest version of node.js from here

Step 3 :
Create React App
Run these on Command Prompt