Learning React | Guides

Mafs is a React library. React is itself a library for building web applications—perhaps even the most popular frontend library in the world at the moment.

This library was build on top of React for a few reasons:

React is well-documented and easy to learn. Even if you've never used React, you can get up and running with Mafs quickly.
React encourages writing declarative code. This library relies heavily on the declarative model of programming to make building a visualization feel more intuitive—just put whatever components you want on the screen, and declare what they should look like for a given state.
React is pretty performant by default. While you can take a few steps to improve the performance of your Mafs visualization, it's usually performant enough to not think about it at all. This is largely because of abstractions built into React that Mafs relies on heavily—things like memoization, context, and batched updates.

Where to start

React's own documentation is a great place to start. If you're starting from complete scratch, and just want to play with Mafs, check out the Create a New React App section to get up and running quickly.