In this chapter, we are going to learn the basics of building web applications with React. React is built and is widely used by Facebook. Many other famous applications, such as Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, Periscope, and so on, also use React in their web applications, which has helped to develop React into a mature and battle-tested JavaScript library. At the time of writing this book, React is the most popular frontend JavaScript framework in GitHub with an active community of over 70,000 developers.
Unlike most of the other JavaScript frameworks, React does not consider itself a framework but as a library for building user interfaces. It perfectly handles the view layer of your application by composing each section of your app into smaller functional components.
Functions are simple JavaScript code that perform a task. We have been using functions since the very...