Why React?
If you’re reading this book, you probably are already familiar with React. But if you’re not, don’t worry. I’ll do my best to keep philosophical definitions to a minimum. However, this is a long book with a lot of content, so I feel that setting the tone is an appropriate first step. Our goal is to learn React and React Native, but it’s also to build a scalable and adaptive architecture that can handle everything we want to build with React today and in the future. In other words, we want to create a foundation around React, with a set of additional tools and approaches that can withstand the test of time. This book will guide you through the process of using tools like routing, TypeScript typing, testing, and many more.
This chapter starts with a brief explanation of why React exists. Then, we’ll think about the simplicity of React and how it is able to handle many of the typical performance issues faced by web developers. Next, we’ll go over the declarative philosophy of React and the level of abstraction that React programmers can expect to work with. Then, we’ll touch on some of the major features of React. And finally, we will explore how we can set up a project to start to work with React.
Once you have a conceptual understanding of React and how it solves problems with UI development, you’ll be better equipped to tackle the remainder of the book. This chapter will cover the following topics:
- What is React?
- What’s new in React?
- Setting up a new React project
