A crucial part of React Native
are these components which are built into React Native
because as you learned in the first section of this course, these are special components for which React
Native knows how to translate, how to compile them to Native platform widgets and you can only use such
components in React Native apps.
You can build your own components but these then also in the end have to be made up of these built-in
components,
you can't use divs or paragraphs or anything like that.
So we have to work with the ones built into React Native because there React Native knows how to translate
them and there, we have things like the view, text, button, touchable text input, image,
these are some of the components you will see throughout this course,
there are more and we'll see plenty of them throughout the course and you will learn how to work with
those, how to configure them and how to compose nice user interfaces with the help of these components.
Now you, as I just mentioned of course, build your user interfaces, your custom components with the help
of these built-in components here, so you compose your user interface, your components from these built
in components there and it looks something like this. You build your own my title component by taking
the built-in ones and mixing and matching them together to get the look or the component you need. Styling
also is an important part in React Native apps and there it's important to understand that React Native
doesn't use web technologies, it doesn't use HTML, it uses Javascript arguably but doesn't use HTML
and it also doesn't use CSS, so CSS which you use for styling in the web is not supported in React
Native but it gives you styling commands, styling configuration you can add to your components, so to
these components that are built into React Native either with the help of inline styles or with so-called
stylesheet objects and there, you write these style instructions in Javascript but you use a syntax
which is based on CSS. So it's not directly related to CSS but of course it's influenced by CSS,
many of the instructions you use here are inspired by CSS and many of the rules or of the properties
you know from CSS also work here in Javascript, in your React Native app. Now regarding the inline
styles vs stylesheet objects thing, I will show both but I will already say that using stylesheet
object is preferred but I'll come back to that once we do use it.
And with that, now that we know roughly what's up with components and styling,
why don't we just get started and start working with these things?