Learn React in 2018
React is already more popular than the JavaScript language itself!
React – love it or hate it, but it is still considered the "future" simply because it’s growing at an unprecedented rate for a library. This is probably due to the hype that React-Native has brought about, giving mobile apps update freedom from their tyrannical app stores. But we're talking about React, and React is web. After all, browsers are probably the most-used software applications on computers and mobile devices alike.
So, how do you learn React? Start off with the basics.
- Vanilla React: https://reactjs.org/
Use React with no other libraries other than itself. Learn how to manage state on it's own, and learn why people have built solutions to abstract the state. (don't worry if you don't understand what that meant)
- Redux: https://redux.js.org/
Now that you know the basics to React, learn Redux. Redux is an abstracted state management solution that allows a state tree, called 'reducers', and functions called 'actions'. These are two separate entites that act together to produce new state and update the existing state.
- styled-components: https://www.styled-components.com/
You have React down, a state management solution down, and now you need a better styling solution. Let's check out styled-components. This lets us write css in our javascript, that's scarry! Actually, we're taking away the step of decorating the divs ourselves. We're just building reusable components with this library, then using those reusable components. This makes it easy for us to define how we want to style our React components. I'm still rather new to this library, so I'm not very good at explaining it, sorry.
Homework: Now that you have the jist of React, you can explore! Learn a Routing solution like React-Router, or learn a different state management solution if you didn't like Redux. React is so popular, you will never get bored! I hope you enjoyed this blog post.
