Introduction to React

React (also known as React.js or ReactJS) is a free and open-source front-end JavaScript library for creating UI component-based user interfaces.

React is maintained by Meta (previously Facebook) along with a community of individual developers and organizations.

According to the , React surpassed jQuery as the most commonly used web framework with about 40.14% of the market share. It was also the most desired, with one in every four developers using it. React is also used by over 8000 industry leaders.

In this article, we will see reasons why you should learn React and how to get started with it.

Why Learn React?

There are many reasons why you should learn React, but here are some of the most frequently mentioned points highlighted by many React experts:

React is easy to use

Many people, including myself, like React for its simplicity, flexibility, performance, usability, virtual DOM, components, and many other features.

Working with React simplifies our lives as developers because of its straightforward and modular infrastructure, which allows us to build and maintain our applications much more quickly.

There is a high demand for React developers

In the United States, the average yearly salary for a React developer is $120,000. Many businesses and companies use React, which forces them to look for new talent on a daily basis.

If you have any reservations about learning or becoming a React developer, reconsider. There's no need to worry – there will likely always be a job for you as a React developer because there are thousands of open positions right now (even remotely).

It is not difficult to learn the basics of React

This could be interpreted differently, as learning React as a complete beginner coder will undoubtedly take longer than learning JavaScript as an expert. But what I mean is that React is not difficult to grasp once you have thoroughly understood the fundamentals of JavaScript.

React also allows you to reuse simple pieces of functionality across your React web app.

To summarize, React is relatively simple to learn, has a large community of support with many open-source projects on Github, and offers many job opportunities.

Learning React will also help you better understand JavaScript, which will come in handy throughout your career.

Since React is a JavaScript framework, it is critical to understand certain JavaScript fundamentals in order to flow and understand React. such as map, filter, and many others. This will help you learn React faster.

How to Install React

The best way to install React or create a React project is to install it with . This is one of the steps that most beginners struggle with, but in this guide, we'll go over how to get started properly and successfully.

We'll be using our terminal for this (you can either make use of an in built terminal or download any you prefer). One prerequisite is to have installed on your PC, knowing full well that NPM (or, alternatively, Yarn) is required. We'll be using NPM for this guide.

To confirm that you have Node installed on your PC, just launch your terminal/command prompt and type node -v and npm -v to see which versions you have.

Because create-react-app requires that you have installed, you'll need to make sure your Node version is not less than v14.0.0 and your NPM version is not less than v5.6.

Suppose you have an older version of NPM, you could use the following command to update it:

npm update -g

Once you've figured out NPM, you can now install React with create-react-app.