Your web browser renders HTML pages which usually contain something like this:

<div>
    <h1>Hello HTML</h1>
    <p>Some text wrapped in HTML p tags</p>
    <div>
        <div>Some text inside a div inside a div</div>
        <img src="path/to/image.png" alt="An image" />
    </div>
</div>

Your HTML page is composed of HTML elements like <h1>Title</h1>.

ReactJS has a similar syntax for rendering HTML elements. In fact, the above HTML code looks the same when translated into React. This is because React elements are created using a language which was developed specifically for React called JSX. JSX is a JavaScript syntax extension which looks very similar to HTML.

const reactElement = <h1>Hello React</h1>

The above example shows a JavaScript constant variable being assigned to the return value of some JSX <h1>Hello React</h1>. The return value is a ReactDOM element, which the React DOM will eventually transform into the actual HTML element <h1>Hello React</h1> to be rendered in the browser.

Let's open up src/App.jsx. The file has the .jsx extension which means the file contains jsx code.

import './styles/App.css'

const App = () => {
  return (
    <h1>Hello React</h1>
  )
}

export default App

The first line imports styles from the css file ./styles/App.css where "." refers to the current directory (src folder). We'll use these styles later on.

The file also has a JavaScript arrow function called App which returns the React element <h1>Hello React</h1>. JavaScript arrows functions look a bit strange, but it's works pretty much the same as functions in any other language as far as we are concerned. Here are some examples of how JS arrow functions are very similar to what you might be familiar with in other languages.

An arrow function in JavaScript:

const add = (a, b) => {
    return a + b
}

works the same as a regular function in JavaScript:

function add(a, b) {
    return a + b
}

works the same as a function in Python:

def add(a, b):
    return a + b

works the same as a function in C:

int add(int a, int b) {
    return a + b;
}

The last line of src/App.jsx:

export default App

simply makes the App function available to be imported into other files. In the case of this project it is imported in src/index.js as we saw in the last tutorial.

A React project is mainly made up of "components" which you can think of a separate blocks of HTML elements which are each responsible for their own state and functionality. A component is made using a function such as the App function we have in src/App.jsx.

With the starting code we have at the moment, src/index.js imports the App component and renders it using the root React element. This is enough to work as a basic React app, so let's try to run it!

If you open package.json you will see some "dependencies" including "react", "react-dom" and "react-scripts". We need to install these dependencies for our project to work. Open your shell and go into this project's directory. Then run this command:

$ npm install

This will download and install all the packages that this project depends on, listed in package.json. You'll notice there is now a node_modules folder, a very big folder containing the actual code of the packages that your project uses i.e. dependencies. You usually won't need to look into it, but when you import packages into your project's code, here is where the packages come from.

In package.json you will also see some "scripts" which maps some keywords like "start" to commands like "react-scripts start". To start a development server for working on our project, run this command:

$ npm start

Your React app will then open in the browser at a url like http://localhost:3000.

In the next tutorial we will start coding in the App component to get some more elements showing on the app.