How I learned React

About me

I have been working with web applications for about 3 years as a full stack developer.

Why I wanted to learn React

I have always tried to improve UI by using various technologies and found it difficult.
React makes it easy to develop maintainable apps. Its similarity to HTML's tags and simply passing props down to components makes it easy to develop and debug single page applications.

How I approached learning React

My approach was to read the documentation on reactjs.org and complete the tutorials. I have also found youtube videos to be extremely helpful.

Challenges I faced

The concept of Virtual DOM made it challenging to understand how to have uniquely identifiable elements from a list. I frequently ran into the issue of missing key prop when rendering items from an array. It required me researching online and reading through React documentation to figure why keys are needed.

Another challenge I am currently overcoming is learning Redux along with React. If developing bigger apps, it is essential to use Redux to store the logic and state of the app.

Key takeaways

The thing I enjoyed most was learning by doing. I ran into many errors and addressed them each. There are a lot of tools available to help debug these issues.
One of the key take away was to ensure you understand the tools you are using and practicing. Reading through online samples and coding by myself made sure that I retain the information and be able to use it again.

Tips and advice

Practice!
The more you code in this technology and the more you look at others code makes it easy to find common mistakes, and to become better developer.

Final thoughts and next steps

My next learning goal is to learn Redux. I plan to use the same process of learning by building for this goal as well!