React Reference Overview
The React reference documentation is broken down into functional subsections:
React
Programmatic React features:
- - Use different React features from your components.
- - Built-in components that you can use in your JSX.
- - APIs that are useful for defining components.
- - Provide instructions to bundlers compatible with React Server Components.
React DOM
React-dom contains features that are only supported for web applications (which run in the browser DOM environment). This section is broken into the following:
- - Hooks for web applications which run in the browser DOM environment.
- - React supports all of the browser built-in HTML and SVG components.
- - The
react-dom
package contains methods supported only in web applications. - - The
react-dom/client
APIs let you render React components on the client (in the browser). - - The
react-dom/server
APIs let you render React components to HTML on the server.
Rules of React
React has idioms — or rules — for how to express patterns in a way that is easy to understand and yields high-quality applications:
- – Purity makes your code easier to understand, debug, and allows React to automatically optimize your components and hooks correctly.
- – React is responsible for rendering components and hooks when necessary to optimize the user experience.
- – Hooks are defined using JavaScript functions, but they represent a special type of reusable UI logic with restrictions on where they can be called.
Legacy APIs
- - Exported from the
react
package, but not recommended for use in newly written code.