My experience with React
April 18, 2020 - 3 min read 🍵🍵Tags: webdevreactjavascript
I finally completed The Modern React Bootcamp from Colt Steele’s course! I wrote a ton of notes and actively applied my new skills throughout my projects including making tweaks to my blog and having a long list of React projects found on my portfolio.
Last year, I wanted to build a blog to document my journey and stumbled upon Gatsby which used React. Building my blog using Gatsby gave me a project that I wanted to work on and eventually became a little more comfortable with React.
After taking a JavaScript Modern Bootcamp by Andrew Mead, I jumped into this course with fresh knowledge of JavaScript and eventually things started to make sense to me.
I started to realize React’s potential when I was given a take home project. I was given a task to create an API call and display information on a website, without the use of a framework like Vue, React or Angular.
I realized how tedious and cumbersome it was to add data to the DOM. What should have taken a line of JSX to interpolate data into the DOM turned into multiple lines of code telling JavaScript what elements to add after showing text content.
I definitely realized that simple UI interfaces without the use of a library or framework can take a lot of work and I now understand why these frameworks exists and what problems it aims to solve.
There are more complicated topics such as dealing with an application that has user authentication and how the UI is shown versus a non-authenticated user. I am excited to start building full stack applications using React in the next few months to learn more.
What exactly is React?
React is a JavaScript library used for building user interfaces and is maintained by Facebook. React can be used to build single-page or mobile applications.
What is the purpose of React?
The purpose of React is to show content to users and handle user interactions.
The basic building blocks are from React components (functional or classes) which take properties that can pass down important information and its ability to maintain a state which can hold information.
In addition, React uses something called JSX which allows us to write JavaScript code in something that looks like HTML. It allows React to show HTML content.
That’s basically the gist of it. As the time goes on, I will continue to add more posts about React and the interesting things I’ve learn and hopefully be able to explore other frameworks once I’m confident with React.
