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You're reading from  Beginning React

Product typeBook
Published inJul 2018
Reading LevelBeginner
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ISBN-139781789530520
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Andrea Chiarelli
Andrea Chiarelli
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Andrea Chiarelli

Andrea Chiarelli has over 20 years experience as a software engineer and technical writer. In his professional career, he has used various technologies for the projects he has been involved in: from C# to JavaScript, from Angular to React, from ASP.NET to PhoneGap/Cordova. He has contributed to many online and offline magazines and has been the author of a few books published by Wrox Press and Packt. Currently, he is a senior software engineer at the Italian office of Apparound, Inc. and a regular contributor to HTML.it, an Italian online magazine focused on web technologies. You can follow him on Twitter at @andychiare.
Read more about Andrea Chiarelli

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What is React?


To put it simply, React is a JavaScript library for building composable user interfaces. This means that we can build a user interface by composing items called components. A component is an element that contributes to building a user interface. It could be a textbox, a button, a whole form, a group of other components, and so on. Even the entire application's user interface is a component. So, React encourages the creation of components to build a user interface; it's even better if these components are reusable.

React components have the ability to present data that changes over time, and the visualization of that changing data is automatic when we follow a few guidelines.

Since the library deals with user interfaces, you may wonder which presentational design patterns React was inspired by: Model-View-Controller, Model-View-Presenter, Model-View-ViewModel, or something else. React is not bound to a specific presentational pattern. React implements the View part of the most common patterns, leaving developers free to choose the best approach to implement the model, the presenter, and everything else they need to build their application. This aspect is important, since it allows us to classify it as a library, not as a framework; therefore, comparisons with frameworks such as Angular may throw up some inconsistencies.

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Beginning React
Published in: Jul 2018Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781789530520
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Author (1)

author image
Andrea Chiarelli

Andrea Chiarelli has over 20 years experience as a software engineer and technical writer. In his professional career, he has used various technologies for the projects he has been involved in: from C# to JavaScript, from Angular to React, from ASP.NET to PhoneGap/Cordova. He has contributed to many online and offline magazines and has been the author of a few books published by Wrox Press and Packt. Currently, he is a senior software engineer at the Italian office of Apparound, Inc. and a regular contributor to HTML.it, an Italian online magazine focused on web technologies. You can follow him on Twitter at @andychiare.
Read more about Andrea Chiarelli