What is React and why should you use it?

React is a JavaScript library developed internally at Facebook and open sourced in 2013 for building interactive user interfaces for the web. It introduces a new way to deal with the Browser’s DOM. Gone are the days of manually updating the DOM and laboriously keeping track of each piece of state that makes scalability and new feature development at best, a risky endeavor. Instead, React deals with the DOM in a very novel way. You declaratively define your user interface at any point in time. React removes the need to worry about which part of the DOM needs to update when data changes, and enables you to essentially re-render your entire application at any point in time with minimal DOM changes.

How this book helps

React introduces new and exciting concepts that challenge current practices. This book will enable you to navigate all of these concepts and help you understand why they are beneficial and can help you build scalable Single Page Applications (SPAs).

React focuses mainly on the “view” part of an application, and thus does not prescribe server communication or code organization. In this book we will cover the current best practices and complementary tools to help you build a complete application with React.

What do you need to know prior to reading the book?

To get the most out of this book you’ll need to be experienced with JavaScript and HTML. It’s beneficial if you have experience with writing SPAs (regardless of which framework like Backbone.js, AngularJS, or Ember.js), but it is not required. 

Source code and sample application

Throughout this book we’ll be referencing bits of our example application: reddit clone. You can read the full source code at http://git.io/vlcpa and view an online demo at http://git.io/vlCUI

The writing process

This book was written as a focused virtual book sprint over the course of a month or two. This process helps create fresh and current content, whereas conventional books often lag behind the coverage of cutting edge trends and technology.

In the second edition everything has been updated to React 0.14 and a new sample application has been created.

Authors

The book is written by a team of experienced and dedicated JavaScript developers:

Richard Feldman is the lead Front-End Engineer at NoRedInk, an education tech company in San Francisco. He is a functional programming enthusiast, a conference speaker, and the author of seamless-immutable, an open-source library that provides immutable data structures that are backward-compatible with normal JavaScript objects and arrays. He is @rtfeldman on both Twitter and GitHub.

Frankie Bagnardi is a Senior Front-end Developer creating user experiences for various clients. In his free time, he answers questions on StackOverflow (FakeRainBrigand) and IRC (GreenJello), and enjoys small projects. You can reach him at [email protected].

Simon Højberg is a Senior UI Engineer at Swipely in Providence, RI. He is the co-organizer of the Providence JS Meetup group and former JavaScript instructor at Startup Institute Boston. He spends his time building functional User Interfaces with JavaScript, and hacking on side projects like cssarrowplease.com. Simon tweets at @shojberg.

Jeremiah Hall is a Senior Software Engineer/Architect currently at OpenGov Inc. He is also the founder of Aspect Apps, building a journaling application that uses React Native and JavaScript for the UI. He can be found on Twitter at @jeremiahrhall.