My struggle with learning React as a beginner

Merry Christmas.

A lot of React tutorials on the web are terribly bad IMO, most of them outdated, a lot of them discuss 5-6 technologies at once without talking much about react itself. Probably because the authors have been in the js ecosystem for so long that they can no longer remember what it means not to understand.

Makes me wanna write one when i fully get a grasp on it. So this is not a tutorial really, but rather an intuition about some key concepts that every beginner will come across, while learning React (e.g. webpack, babel, components).

Here's my learning experience with React, sharing it in case you’re trying to learn it, or trying to teach it to someone who can't fully comprehend React.

Setting up react involves several steps which can make the whole thing even more confusing for a beginner. Starting from webpack and babel, I didn’t understand why they mattered, at first. but after i spent a couple of months coding in nodejs in my internship, and then one day i wanted to do frontend, i noticed the difference between the js in nodejs vs vanilla js that was needed for front-end. and i learned that i needed something that’ll change my code from ES6 to ES5 so that all browsers can interpret the JavaScript code correctly (i used browserify at first). Later when I started setting up my react project i noticed i was creating tons of files, which felt weird because web browser wats fewer files to render the view of your website, not more files. I learned this is the purpose of webpack, to bundle EVERYTHING into one file so the browser can interpret that.

while doing frontend dev using vanilla js (pure js, no frameworks) i also heavily struggled with generating components on frontend (when the scale is bigger this can get really annoying), and i have seen the way react creates components but i have yet to see how it uses those components and how that’s easier than vanilla js. trying that out now.

Here's my experience with React as of now! I'll be learning it more in the coming days and will hopefully write a good beginner tutorial (or maybe a vlog, too) soon :)

Btw, I really loved this tutorial.

I also recommend this interactive react tutorial, and this post about Babel's role.

If you have good resources/advice for me, please do share:)