2 - The popularity of React

You might wonder why should you learn React? Is knowing vanilla JS, jQuery, Vue.js, etc. not enough? The reason to learn React is that it is very popular. Extremely popular. React has exploded in popularity over the last few years. If you're a frontend developer, then you'll have much better career prospects if you know React.

Popularity of React

Number of Questions

As per the stack overflow trends for the questions getting asked on a topic, React stays way ahead of the competition. Take a look at the graph below:

(Credit: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=reactjs%2Cvue.js%2Cangular%2Csvelte%2Cangularjs%2Cvuejs3)

React gets four times more questions compared to the closest competitor, Angular (by Google). The others like Svelte and Vue are hardly noticeable.

Choice of framework

The recent developer survey conducted by Stack Overflow (a popular and industry standard survey) shows that React comes at #2, right behind Node.js. Well, Node.js and React aren't in competition anyway.

(Credit: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-technologies-web-frameworks-and-technologies)

React is used by more than double the number of people than using Angular. jQuery is still quite popular (mostly due to legacy sites). However, the trend is going towards React. In 2023, any new development will likely choose React over other frontend technologies.

Jetbrains survey

Another survey conducted by JetBrains confirms that React is popular.

(Credit: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2022/javascript/)

GitHub stars

React enjoys more GitHub stars than any other frontend frameworks. React has over 200K stars, which is more than double of the close competitors. jQuery (with 57K stars) is not shown in the chart below.

(Credit: NPM trends)

Twitter followers

Now that we get the trend, we know that React will have more Twitter followers than others. Take a look at the chart below:

React leads with ~700K followers.

Jobs

Off lately, there are way more job openings requiring knowledge of React compared to the close competitors. If you're a frontend developer, then learning React will open way more doors than you can imagine. Take a look at the Google trends for job market:

(Credit: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?cat=31&q=Vue%20jobs,React%20jobs,Angular%20jobs)

Once again, the number of React jobs exceeds Angular jobs by a landslide.

Website usage

The last chart of this section shows the percent of websites using React, Anuglar, and Vue.

(Credit: https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/js-angularjs,js-react,js-vuejs)

While 3% (of React) doesn't look much when compared to ~77% of websites that use jQuery, we know that jQuery is unlikely to be the choice of framework for newer development work. jQuery simply makes it easier to write code compared to vanilla JS. React, on the other hand, follows a different design style and produces a more organized & maintainable code.

Undoubtedly, 10 years later, React is going stronger than ever. As of today, React is the UI framework of choice. Your decision to learn React will surely pay great dividends in the future.

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Now that we've established that learning React is very important, in the next section, let's go over the style of this book.