Web development has rapidly evolved over the years. The complexity of user interfaces and interactions has evolved along with it. Interestingly, there has been a surge in developer tools to meet the requirements and challenges presented by today’s web applications.

One of our software developers at Mindera UK (software house in Leicester), Gregory Jarvez, is here to help by sharing how to learn React.js in 2019.

Why should I learn React?

Meet React.js, one of many JavaScript libraries for building user interfaces. It allows you to build isolated views for states in your application, which update and render when data changes. This declarative nature of building applications makes behaviour predictable and bugs easier to find.

React is platform-independent, thus you learn once and write everywhere.

React can render on servers using Node.js, mobile devices with React Native, desktop applications with electron etc. React has a component-based architecture that helps you write encapsulated components (views), decoupled and each managing its own state.

As of writing this article, React.js has over 138k stargazers on GitHub, hence showing that it is used by several developers and organisations — for example, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix and Mindera. It was originally kick-started by Facebook and currently has over 1.3k contributors maintaining the library. It also has great community support.

Credit: Max Pixel

What are the requirements to learn React.js?

We strongly advise a good foundation in the core web and mark-up languages prior to learning any related framework or library. React is no exception.

React uses JSX, a syntax extension to JavaScript that closely resembles HTML. CSS is typically used to style applications and, of course, JavaScript for adding behaviour. You will utilise important language features, constructs, and methodologies while developing React applications, henceforth these requirements.

Can you learn React.js fast?

Short answer? YES!

React is a relatively small library or at least started as such. It has a few core concepts that need to be understood prior to building applications with it — twelve, to be precise. To give you an idea, if you learnt two concepts every day, it would take six days.

As with any library or framework, React has some advanced topics and patterns that are worth looking into as well. They will enable you to solve problems elegantly and further enhance the user experience.

Credit: Max Pixel

Should I learn React or JavaScript first?

React is built with JavaScript. It uses core JavaScript language features and concepts. Therefore, it is imperative to understand it before tackling React. This is applicable to any other framework or library.

Should I learn React.js before learning React Native?

React adheres to the “learn once, write anywhere” policy, hence it is platform-independent. The platform you learn React on is not very important — choose a platform and code away. Comfortable with mobile development? Try learning React with React Native. Otherwise, the web is a great place to start. The concepts remain unchanged, only the renderer changes.

Where should I start?

The doc is a great place to start. It is concise and teaches you everything you need to know. There is also a myriad of video courses to choose from. We recommend learning by doing.

Following library authors and ‘community leaders’ is a great way to keep up to date with emerging patterns and conventions.

Good luck!

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