From the course: Master Next.js: Elaborate Hands-On Web Development, React Basics, Advanced Next.js, and Deployment

What is React for complete beginners?

From the course: Master Next.js: Elaborate Hands-On Web Development, React Basics, Advanced Next.js, and Deployment

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What is React for complete beginners?

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Recall, we briefly said Next.js is this framework built around React. So at the highest level, we've got Next.js. Then picture it wrapped around something else, another technology called React. So what is React? Well, React is made out of JavaScript. So React is essentially a JavaScript library, or you can call it even a toolkit, tailored for crafting dynamic user interfaces. We talked about user interfaces, right? But look, but imagine this is a website. So imagine randomwebsite.com. We see a logo, we see some address information, places we can click on, and some form to fill out. That's our UI. That's the user interface. To be very specific, when we talk about user interfaces, we're referring to the components that users engage with directly on their screens. Not to be confused with user experience. That's the experience that users have when they engage with those components on their screens. All right, and the experience is different than the interface itself. I like to always point this out because I've heard in so many meetings over the years working with people time and time again, professionals in the industry confuse the two or don't really understand the two. it's important to get these things right from the get-go. So describing React as a library is a good way, in my opinion, because as a library, it's a library of what? You can think of it as a library, not of books, but a library of tools in order to get this nice UI development. So it grants developers the discretion to determine how and where these tools are integrated within their application. so then in a somewhat non-biased format, of course, within the rules and restrictions of React. So it's open source, and React was created initially by Facebook or Meta, and actually Instagram and Facebook uses React. That's when you go to facebook.com, you're seeing a React project in production that's working, and tons and tons of other companies use it. In fact, all the companies I mentioned they use Next are using React, because remember, Next is wrapped around React. In a way, you can think of React being wrapped around JavaScript because it's a library built out of JavaScript. And it's open source, meaning that there's a thriving community around it. So it's constantly growing. And there's tons and tons of new tools that are added. Now, they're not always good, but that's up to you to kind of look through and see what's good, what's not good. Of course, we're going to go over some of the most popular ones that I recommend in this course and that come from the official Next.js docs. But that's really React. It's a library of tools to build websites and built out of JavaScript, and it's an open library. Now that we've talked about React, and again, if you're a total beginner, that might sound a little overwhelming, but we're going to go through it in the very programming videos coming up. If you have no programming experience, we're going to go through building a website from scratch, building web development together from scratch. Once we do it, once you actually do it hands-on, these concepts are going to make a ton, ton more sense. If you already have basic web development skills or exposure, then this is going to be a lot easier for you to understand. But if you don't, welcome to our world. That's all I can say. Be patient and go through the actual practice, which we will be doing coming up. So now that we've talked about Next being this framework wrapped around React, and React being this library made out of JavaScript that makes it easier, essentially, for you to build web development, to do web development, because JavaScript is the most popular language in the world used for web development. Let's take a look at these things together so it makes even more sense in the next lesson. See you there.

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