React.js is a free and open source front end JavaScript library for building user interfaces based on UI components. It is maintained by meta (previously Facebook) and a community of individual developers and companies. We can use react as a base in the development of single page or mobile applications. React allows us to create reusable UI components.

Why React.js?

Here are some reasons you should definitely learn React in 2022:

• React makes JavaScript coding easier. React.js uses a special syntax called JSX which allows you to combine HTML with JavaScript. This is not a requirement in react; developers can still work in plain JavaScript, but JSX is much easier to use. The component based approach, well-defined life cycle and use of plain JavaScript makes react easy to learn, build and support professional web and mobile applications.

• Extremely competent. Being easy to use and simple to read made react easy to understand and implement. This ease of use has also helped many developers adopt the tech and make it part of their toolkit.

• Excellent cross-platform support. React components wrap existing native code and interact with native APIs via React’s declarative UI paradigm and JavaScript. This enables native app development for whole new developers and can let existing native teams work much faster.

• Handles dependencies. A dependency is some third party code that your app depends on. Just like a child depends on its parent, your app depends on other people’s code. A piece of code becomes a true dependency when your own app cannot function without it. Dependencies in React are those things you need to install or import for doing specific things. For example, if you want to add routing (moving from one page to another which changes your URL) in your React project, then you need to install react-router-dom by doing npm install react-router-dom in the terminal window.

• Easy to adopt. React.js makes it easier to do functional and reactive programming. Both paradigms offer simple solutions to common problems like code reuse, testing, handling real-time interactions. Functional and reactive programming are relatively new ideas to most JavaScript programmers, so React offers an opportunity to try it out. React also places heavy emphasis on using vanilla JavaScript to solve problems. This means fundamental skills are more transferable.

Other additional advantages of React are:

• React makes template UI design easy.

• Provides amazing developer tools.

• UI focused designs.

Next: JSX and Components