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What is React? JavaScript Library Guide

Table of Contents
- What is React?
- Why use React?
- How does React work?
- What are the features of React?
- What are the advantages of React?
- What are the limitations of React?
- What are the major companies using React?
- What are the alternatives to React?
- What are the prerequisites to learn React?
- What are the resources to learn React?
- What are the popular React libraries?
- Related Topics
What is React?
Building interactive UIs with vanilla JavaScript means manually tracking state changes and updating the DOM to match. As applications grow, this becomes error-prone and hard to maintain. React solves this by letting you describe what the UI should look like for any given state—the framework handles the DOM updates automatically.
React is maintained by Meta and a community of individual developers and companies. It can be used for single-page or mobile applications, handling rapidly changing data efficiently. Complex React applications typically require additional libraries for state management, routing, and API interaction.
Why use React?
React allows developers to create large web applications that can change data, without reloading the page. The main purpose of React is to be fast, scalable, and simple. It works only on user interfaces in application. This corresponds to the view in the MVC template. It can be used with a combination of other JavaScript libraries or frameworks, such as Angular JS in MVC. It is not a full framework, and it is not a full MVC framework. It is just a view layer. React allows developers to create large web applications that can change data, without reloading the page. The main purpose of React is to be fast, scalable, and simple. It works only on user interfaces in application. This corresponds to the view in the MVC template. It can be used with a combination of other JavaScript libraries or frameworks, such as Angular JS in MVC. It is not a full framework, and it is not a full MVC framework. It is just a view layer.
How does React work?
React creates a virtual DOM. When state changes in a component it firstly runs a "diffing" algorithm, which identifies what has changed in the virtual DOM. The second step is reconciliation, where it updates the DOM with the results of diff. This way, React avoids the expensive DOM operations and makes updates in a very efficient manner. React creates a virtual DOM. When state changes in a component it firstly runs a "diffing" algorithm, which identifies what has changed in the virtual DOM. The second step is reconciliation, where it updates the DOM with the results of diff. This way, React avoids the expensive DOM operations and makes updates in a very efficient manner.
What are the features of React?
- It uses the virtual DOM instead of the real DOM.
- It uses server-side rendering.
- It follows uni-directional data flow or data binding.
- It uses reusable/composable UI components to develop the view.
What are the advantages of React?
- It increases the application's performance.
- It can be conveniently used on the client as well as server side.
- Because of virtual DOM, React reduces the load on the browser.
- React is modular, maintainable and flexible.
What are the limitations of React?
- React is just a library, not a full-blown framework.
- Its library is very large and takes time to understand.
- It can be little difficult for the novice programmers to understand.
- Coding gets complex as it uses inline templating and JSX.
What are the major companies using React?
- Netflix
- New York Times
- Yahoo
- Khan Academy
- Airbnb
- Dropbox
- Asana
- Atlassian
- Uber
- Codecademy
- Salesforce
- Cloudflare
What are the alternatives to React?
- Angular
- Ember
- Backbone
- Vue
- Meteor
- Polymer
- Aurelia
- Mithril
What are the prerequisites to learn React?
- HTML/CSS
- JavaScript
- ES6
- NPM
- Babel
- Webpack
- Node.js
- Git and GitHub
What are the resources to learn React?
What are the popular React libraries?
- Redux
- React Router
- Jest
- Enzyme
- MobX
- Material-UI
- Ant Design
- Semantic UI
- Gatsby
- Next.js
- Next.js
- Create React App
- Storybook
- Formik
- React Hook Form
Related Topics
- React.js - A Deep Study - Advanced React concepts and patterns
- Next.js 14 - The React framework for production
- What is Next.js? - Understanding the Next.js framework
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