What is React?

This site teaches you how to build web apps with React.

React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

Before React, you would have to switch between HTML, JavaScript and CSS files for similar pieces of your application. React utilizes JSX, a smarter extension to JavaScript, to put HTML and CSS inside JavaScript. React Components are sharable pieces of JavaScript for any type of frontend UI element you can think of.

While this may sound complicated, React is built around making things easy to use.

Who uses React?

React was created at Facebook and is used to drive the main websites of Twitter, AirBnB, Walmart and countless other applications. It is typical for an entire frontend application running in your web browser to built with React. Industries everywhere are investing in React as a longterm solution to fulfilling their online goals.

What you need to know before React

There is some basic JavaScript you will need to know to start coding React apps. You may already be familiar with the basics of HTML and CSS, if not it is easy to get started.

How this course works

Each lesson will feature three panels- a react sandbox editor and browser, and a description panel. The description will typically be an explanation of the code and app demo shown. There may be an assignment that you can attempt to solve in the editor. This can help with encouraging you to solve a variety of problems, without the stress of getting the correct answer. The next lesson will usually have the solution, so you don't need to worry about hacking your way through to continue the course.

When you are done with the lesson, simply click "next". There is no requirement to solve puzzles or get the right answer in the editor. Think of it like a coding book, you can flip ahead as you want.

React School is best experienced on a large monitor. You can collapse the panels if you are on a smaller screen. Click the arrows on the top of the panels to collapse or expand.

Click "next" below to move on.