React Native Express

What is React Native?

React Native is a JavaScript framework for building cross-platform apps. This guide covers everything you need to know to start developing React Native apps.

How to use this guide

Building with React Native is extremely efficient — but getting started can be a little tricky. You should use this guide as a companion to the official Facebook documentation for getting started. This guide covers topics outside the scope of the React Native docs, e.g. JavaScript and React fundamentals, and key patterns/libraries used by the React Native community.

If you run into topics that aren't covered thoroughly in the React Native docs, play with the examples in this guide to quickly get up to speed. If you're already knowledgeable about a topic in this guide (e.g. React components), feel free to skip it entirely.

Before we get started...

I hope you enjoy learning React Native. Most of this guide was written by me, @dvnabbott. Some pages are written by other authors (listed at top of each page).

If you like this site, I recently wrote a digital book, Fullstack React Native: The complete guide to React Native. In the book, I cover the most important React Native topics in-depth as we build 7 full apps. Be sure to check it out!

Hello World

A "Hello world" app for React Native looks something like this:

If you haven't written JavaScript in a while, you may notice some unfamiliar things in the code. This is because it uses newer language features and the JSX language extension. We'll be touching on these after we set up our environment.

Up next

Now, let's set up our React Native development environment!