Why should you learn React JS in 2021 ?

If you are starting your developer journey or you are someone who is looking forward to learn react js, you must already heard a lot about the react js till now.

If you search a little bit and go through the trends, React JS is top on list when it comes to skills a front end developer must have.

Many of us have this urge to learn "how" to do something before we find the answer to "why ?".

So before we start this series about how to become a better react js developer , let's try to figure out answer to some questions.

• Why react js is so popular ?

• What are the characteristics that make react js stand out ?

From my personal experience, here are the things that make react js hot choice :

1. High in Demand : React JS is most sought after skills by the recruiters, if you do a simple search for "reactjs" on LinkedIn, you'll be amazed to see that there are "57,867 results" (i.e. React JS Developer Job postings) for US alone. There is "reactjs" on list of skills required on almost every second job posting for front end developer position.

2. Higher pay : The Starting salary for reactjs front end development positions is above average when compared to the front end positions which does not require reactjs experience.

3. Community : React JS has rich community of developers and a strong support system. You'll never feel alone in your development journey. You can always look up to community for support and solution to your bugs/problems. The tag "reactjs" has almost "309,181 questions" by the time of writing this blog, this is self evident that the volume of discussion that is going around reactjs is quite large. A rich community is also a indication of awesome ad-ons, continuous developments and improvements and stable behavior of application in production environment.

4. Easy to start : React JS is beginner friendly. If you have basic understanding of HTML/CSS/JS and willing to learn, then react js offers easiest way to write your first application. The greatest win for reactjs is the introduction of JSX ( Ability to write HTML & JS together). The Create React App (CRA),a popular npm package that creates a boilerplate react js applications is popular among react js beginners. The boilerplate application provides an easy starting point, so anyone can start building without worrying to learn about the program structure and dependencies.

5. Component based Reusability at design : The reactjs facilitates component based development where large/complex UI is divided into smaller UI component. Each component can have it's behavior and view. You write a component once and you can use is everywhere in the app, this saves a lot of efforts at development side and makes it easier to scale and maintain the application in future.

React Components : Write once, use everywhere.

6. Single Page Application : React JS is best suited for developing the single page applications. The react js application when deployed essentially becomes a single page application having all html/js/css bundled together in to one unit. Whenever you request a react js application only one html page is loaded to your browser, as the user interacts with the application, the pages/components are dynamically loaded in to that single page only.

7. SEO : Though React JS is was not considered to be SEO friendly for a long time due to it's client side rendering as compared to the static html sites but the ability of modern search engines to crawl through JavaScript, made the reactjs excel in SEO game as well. If your primary concern is SEO and you are looking for solution to problem of client side rendering, you can explore about NextJS which is a framework that is used to develop react js applications and supports Server Side rendering and static site generation.

8. Learn once write everywhere : Learning the reactjs will open up more opportunities for you. The reactjs ecosystem is getting stronger day by day. There are many libraries/framework developed having react js at it's core. For example :

• You can write applications using Next JS that require server side rendering.

• You can develop Andorid/iOS applications with react native

9. Rich state management : React provides awesome solution to component level and application level state management, e.g. context , hooks , redux etc.

10. Virtual DOM : The use of virtual DOM for optimized rendering is makes react application faster, more optimized and efficient.