Overview of React.js

General Info

• JavaScript library for building UIs
• Created at Facebook, credited to Mark Zuckerberg
• Launched in 2013
• Extremely popular, widely used by developers

Pros

• Pure functional code for building UIs
• Declarative style, similar to AngularJS

Cons

• High learning curve
• Need to manage state and effects imperatively, complicating simple things
• Requires many additional packages, often poorly maintained

Features

• Functional and class-based components
• Hooks (e.g., useEffect)
• Forward refs
• Higher-order components
• Mix-ins
• Render props
• Suspense

JSX

• Templating handled in JSX, a non-standard way of writing HTML
• Encourages use of callback functions

Strict Mode

• Helps mitigate issues from previous versions

Styling

• Difficult to handle CSS
• Many CSS-in-JS libraries available

Performance

• Can be fast if optimized properly

Popularity

• Most popular UI library, influences front-end development heavily

Final Thoughts

• React has flaws but is influential and respected in the web development community.