Learn JavaScript Deeply.
These three words sent ripples through the entire WordPress world. I was in the crowd at WordCamp US when Matt Mullenberg Mullenweg assigned us that task in his State of The Word 2015 presentation.
The future of the web is API-driven Javascript interfaces, he explained. Calypso, a React.js/Node powered rewrite of the WordPress.com admin had just been released.
In the Q&A session he was asked “which framework” to learn.
Learn Javascript. If you learn JavaScript you learn React. You’ll be able to use Ember, you’ll be able to use Angular. Don’t worry too much about the framework … the important thing is to just get really great with JavaScript and have some fun with it … So short answer: React.
So why learn React? Because Matt told me to?
Why React?
There’s been a lot of buzz about React. That’s because it allows you to create high performance interactive UI components quickly and easily.
React.js is an open source JavaScript UI library developed at Facebook. It still powers parts of Facebook and the entire Instagram.com website.
We built React to solve one problem: building large applications with data that changes over time.
React is all about building reusable components that manage UI updates as the underlying data changes. It does this by abstracting away the DOM and creating its own virtual DOM where your components actually live. This give you amazing gains in performance because React determines what changes will be made before updating the actual DOM.
Is React.js a Framework?
Maybe? Sort of? Not really.
React doesn’t provide all the components Ember or AngularJS do. React is commonly referred to as the “View” in an MVC app. React is all about reusable components and not much else. The idea is to break down your UI into smaller and smaller reusable components that build off each other.
Learning React.JS
I played around with a few online tutorials to get familiar, but never got far. So when my coworker Calvin Koepke asked about getting access to an online course we got a team license and I jumped at the opportunity to take the course
React for Beginners is a video course by Wes Bos for anyone looking to modernize their front end development skill set or build React.js applications from scratch.
It’s broken down into 29 videos, and since there were 29 days in February this year what better way than to do one video each day! Each video is around 5-15 minutes long for a total of about 5 hours of instruction.
In it you’ll build “Catch of the Day”, a real-time app to manage inventory and ordering of a seafood market with immediate updates of data. The app consists of a menu, order form, and authenticated inventory management to update product details.
The course takes an incremental approach where topics build on the previous lessons to develop a complete app from scratch. Following along with the step-by-step instructions you see how it all fits together.
Some of the things you’ll learn:
- Setting up your dev environment
- Understanding React Components and writing markup with JSX
- Maintain your Application’s State
- Communication between components
- URL routing with React Router
- Animating and validating components
- Taking advantage of new ES6 Features
- Popular React modules and packages
- JSX Gotchas, tricks and tips
You’ll also get access to an exclusive Slack channel to get help and learn from others taking the course.
Wes has spent significant time doing actual development work, and is a great teacher as well. His teaching style makes the course fun to go through. It’s well-paced so that you don’t get bored or overwhelmed along the way.
Takeaways
There’s a ton of free React tutorials online. The real value in React for Beginners is the way it presents an incremental, pragmatic approach to learning React.
You may not learn React deeply. The course doesn’t go into Flux, Redux or the many other complementary libraries. It’s sole purpose is to give you a solid foundation to build on and be ready to learn more. It gives you the mental model you need to understand how React works.
If you’re interested in learning React, this course is a great place to start!
Nice write-up, bro. Had to put the course on hold for a while, but hoping to start up again soon. Have you built anything with it yet?
Not yet. So far I’ve only done the sample app from the course. I don’t have any projects on tap to use it for, but I’ll find a reason to play around with it in a bit more detail!
I owe you some thanks for pointing me to this course. It has been excellent!
Thanks for the posting this review Mike, I don’t have any doubt of courses by Wes Bos as his videos are great, I got a lot out of his command line videos, markdown videos which were all free!! I know he can’t do everything free as none of us can do that… I am currently looking at his ES6 and React for Beginners courses and working out which I should do first. I don’t really know React at all and being honest about my JS skills, although used it on and off for some years, weak would come to mind as I am more a back end developer but not sure I want to stay in that can.
Regards,
Nick