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⇱ How To Create Custom Components in React | DigitalOcean


How To Create Custom Components in React

Published on April 16, 2020
👁 How To Create Custom Components in React

The author selected Creative Commons to receive a donation as part of the Write for DOnations program.

Introduction

In this tutorial, you’ll learn to create custom components in React. Components are independent pieces of functionality that you can reuse in your application, and are the building blocks of all React applications. Often, they can be simple JavaScript functions and classes, but you use them as if they were customized HTML elements. Buttons, menus, and any other front-end page content can all be created as components. Components can also contain state information and display markdown.

After learning how to create components in React, you’ll be able to split complex applications into small pieces that are easier to build and maintain.

In this tutorial, you’ll create a list of emojis that will display their names on click. The emojis will be built using a custom component and will be called from inside another custom component. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have made custom components using both JavaScript classes and JavaScript functions, and you’ll understand how to separate existing code into reusable pieces and how to store the components in a readable file structure.

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Tutorial Series: How To Code in React.js

React is a popular JavaScript framework for creating front-end applications, such as user interfaces that allow users to interact with programs. Originally created by Facebook, it has gained popularity by allowing developers to create fast applications using an intuitive programming paradigm that ties JavaScript with an HTML-like syntax known as JSX.

In this series, you will build out examples of React projects to gain an understanding of this framework, giving you the knowledge you need to pursue front-end web development or start out on your way to full stack development.

About the author(s)

Author of Simplifying JavaScript. Writing featured in Slate, FreeCodeCamp, and here! I like to break things and put them back together. 🛠

👁 Timothy Nolan
Timothy Nolan
Editor
Senior Technical Editor
See author profile

Former Senior Technical Editor at DigitalOcean, fiction writer and podcaster elsewhere, always searching for the next good nautical pun! Areas of expertise include Node.js, PostgreSQL, CSS, JavaScript.

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👁 Creative Commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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