Use this gist to write down notes and questions as you read through the lesson plan. https://github.com/turingschool/lesson_plans/blob/master/ruby_04-apis_and_scalability/react_in_theory.markdown
It interacts with the DOM in a more elgant way than jQuery. No more DOM traversal. We can use specific locations and not have to change our CSS or HTML based on new inherant logic.
It uses the Virtual DOM to communicate with the actual DOM and figure out what needs to be updated. We can setState() and effectively tell React what to change in the event loop if a change has been requested.
JSX is like erb in that it is a sort of templating language that can pull real JS variables and display them to the screen.
Events Up and Data Down. We set Event listeners and they update their less intelligent children with the data. The children re-render and the parents are essentially helicopters.
State is mutable. Props are immutable. This provides a nice heiarchy of data structures for us to handle.