Introducing React

While the example in the previous section is a complex problem, the good news is that with React, the solution isn't terribly complex.

Instead of thinking about each element your browser sees and displays for the user as separate from your HTML code and JavaScript code (and thus separate from the states that each exhibits at any given point in time), React allows you to think of all of the code as part of the same data structure, all intertwined and working together:

• The component
• The state
• The display (or render)

This reduces a lot of the complexity and overhead while trying to amalgamate component state and component display with a mixture of CSS and JavaScript along the way. React represents a more elegant way to allow the developer to think holistically about what is on the browser and what the user is interacting with, and how that state changes along the way.

By itself, all of that is a great help to us as developers but React...