Introduction

Using all the features covered up to this point, you can build non-trivial React apps and therefore highly interactive and reactive user interfaces.

This chapter, while introducing some new functions and concepts, will not provide you with tools that would enable you to build even more advanced web apps. You will not learn about groundbreaking, key concepts such as state or props (though you will learn about more advanced concepts in later chapters).

Instead, this chapter allows you to look behind the scenes of React. You will learn how React calculates required DOM updates, and how it ensures that such updates happen without impacting performance in an unacceptable way. You will also learn about some other optimization techniques employed by React—all with the goal of ensuring that your React app runs as smoothly as possible.

Besides this look behind the scenes, you will learn about various built-in functions and concepts that can be used to further optimize...