React 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Building Dynamic Web Apps

Unlocking the Power of React: Revolutionizing Web Development

What is React?

Before React, there were three significant libraries/frameworks in the frontend world that marked milestones in development.

• Firstly, jQuery addressed browser compatibility and DOM element manipulation issues. Its chainable API profoundly influenced subsequent frontend frameworks.
• Next, Knockout introduced the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) architecture concept, mapping data to UI views through templates, significantly reducing DOM manipulation.
• Then came AngularJS, which built upon MVVM by introducing two-way data binding, where data changes automatically reflected in the UI, and UI operations updated the data in reverse. While AngularJS extended HTML with directives, enhancing the flexibility of the template engine, its steep learning curve due to the introduction of many server-side programming concepts and slight performance shortcomings were notable drawbacks.

React is a declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. At the core of React’s philosophy is the idea of combining short, independent code snippets into complex UI interfaces, with these snippets…