If you're rendering your webpage with Javascript, because your <select>s are dynamically generated, then you're going to write a lot of code anyway to render th

If you're rendering your webpage with Javascript, because your <select>s are dynamically generated, then you're going to write a lot of code anyway to render the HTML, keep it in sync with the underlying model, bind the user events to trigger actions, etc. It's a lot of code compared to a static website, but not a lot of code compared to doing it in some other framework, and, for many cases, it is much, much more maintainable. THAT SAID, I agree that it's a horrible example to have on the first page. "Here, let me show you pages and pages of scary code that won't make any sense until you've read the entire book, in an attempt to give a brief overview of this framework." I think there could be a much gentler introduction, preferably using JSX.