If you come from a background where maybe you haven't worked with JavaScript for a long time, or maybe you're new to JavaScript and Create React App is your conduit for using it, you may see a lot of syntax throughout this book and while exploring other people's projects and find that the code is hard to read without a thorough understanding of what's going on. This chapter aims to bridge that gap for people who are new to Babel and describe what it brings to the table with our Create React App project.

The other goal of this chapter is for people who are already comfortable with JavaScript, but are curious about what features Babel introduces and has turned on by default in a Create React App project, so that you can take advantage of all of the quality-of-life improvements and cleaner syntax rules in your project and really put that finishing touch on your project. The goal is to teach you production-ready code so that you're able to contribute at the highest level on your React projects.

As we work through this chapter, you can expect to get caught up on the following topics:

• Const variables
• New arrow function syntax
• Array and object destructuring
• Array and object spread operators
• React Fragments