Why should you learn React.js as a beginner developer?

You have completed HTML, CSS, and JS, and still find out your website doesn't give a professional feel. It seems as if.. we have learned a significant part of the ingredients, but still we find it very difficult to build an attractive website. Here comes a solution. Many libraries and frameworks are emerging among the developer community, to provide the best developing experience. In this blog, we'll be discussing React.js, but the same applies to other frameworks too, e.g: Angular.js, Vue.js, etc.

Disadvantages of simple HTML

Through traditional methods, the development of a complex website not only becomes hard and overwhelming but also lets us drop many important features. This happens because of the non-availability of many programming features in simple HTML. 

This drawback is tackled in many libraries like React.js, Angular.js, etc. In React, HTML codes are served through JSX codes, which look the same as HTML but allow JS codes in between HTML tags. This functionality is very useful in many cases. For example, if you want to display data from a variable through a traditional <script> tag, we need to use DOM manipulation, which is a lot longer.

Features of Frameworks(React.js)

Firstly, The libraries like React.js, use javascript codes to render HTML codes, which provides the flexibility of using pre-built libraries in a much simple way.

It also provides the user to break a single page into different components. These components can be used independently and as many no. of times as we want, making the codebase much more structured. For e.g: If you want a navbar on your site, you need not copy and paste the codes on every page. Instead, you can create a component for it and call it wherever required.

Another major reason, why React.js overtakes traditional HTML, is that it provides various functionalities like state variables and other wonderful hooks. These almost give life to the application. If you feel like updating multiple contents with a click of a single button, useState is the most simple and convenient way to do this. Along with State, various other hooks like useContext, useLocation, etc., can compress tens and hundreds of lines of code to a single line.

Drawbacks

A few drawbacks generally annoy beginners, while using specifically React.js (Although, these can be tackled by exploring the community) :

Firstly, The difference between JSX tags and HTML tags. JSX tags need to close even if they are open tags in HTML. Moreover, few attributes are written differently, e.g: class attribute should be written as className.

Secondly, DOM manipulation in React.js is a bit different than the <script> tag. Hence, many beginners find it difficult to go through the documentation of some modules.

Conclusion

1. Traditional HTML doesn't allow programming features like loops, operators, etc. Hence, applying logic to HTML code gets restricted.
2. In libraries and frameworks like React.js, working with other pre-built libraries becomes easy due to the dominance of JS codes.
3. The ability to break code into components makes the codebase much more structured.
4. Hooks in React make highly complex tasks, easy to apply.
5. As a beginner, we may face difficulties in closing tags and DOM manipulation.