React provides powerful abstractions that free you from touching the DOM directly in most cases, but sometimes you simply need to access the underlying API, perhaps to work with a third-party library or existing code.
## The Mock DOM
## The Virtual DOM
React is so fast because it never talks to the DOM directly. React maintains a fast in-memory representation of the DOM. `render()` methods return a *description* of the DOM, and React can diff this description with the in-memory representation to compute the fastest way to update the browser.