If those reactions were primarily made in HTML, it would be a tremendous amount of work to change all of those likes to reactions and to make sure that they work. Remember when Facebook moved from just likes to reactions? Instead of just being able to like posts, you can now react with a heart, or a smiley face, or a like to any post. I'm going to use a lot of Facebook examples throughout this post since they wrote React in the first place! According to React's website, it is used to 'Build encapsulated components that manage their own state, then compose them to make complex UIs.' React is a JavaScript library build in 2013 by the Facebook development team to make user interfaces more modular (or reusable) and easier to maintain.

I want to get back into writing more code-heavy content, and React is one of my favorite technologies, so I thought I would create a React intro! This post requires knowledge of HTML and JavaScript - I am of the firm opinion that you should know these before moving on to libraries like React! What is React

If you're interested in learning React with Hooks first, check out the 2020 re-write of this post! ← Home A Complete Beginner's Guide to React

React tutorial for beginners