My mental model of React

Like many programmers, I started my career more comfortable on the back end. Unlike many, I now love React.1 Here are some things I've found myself repeating to colleagues who don't feel comfortable on the front end. One-way data flow (see here) is the single most important conceptual point to internalize. There are many, many React concepts, many of which you can defer studying, but do your best to internalize this one. Because the data flow works like this, you can think of a React component (which can be a whole page) as a tree (in the graph-theory sense), with the graph relationship defined by the parent-child React-component relationship. That doesn't mean that child components can't affect parents; it just means that this happens by means of an object passed from the parent (e.g., a callback). The tree-structured, one-way paradigm is a good thing that encourages healthy programs. It's far better to embrace this than to fight against it. Those who complain that the React paradigm…