This week in the curious case of React - #1
Before
This is the first issue of the Curious Case Of React and I'd like to welcome you personally and thank you for subscribing. 🎊 My aim with this newsletter is to help anyone trying to learn React in 2020 taking baby steps from the basics and beyond. (A more intrinsic reason is to be able to re-learn and reflect on the things I have learned as a professional developer for the past few years)
Before we get into the meat of things however I'd like to make sure that you take a pause and reflect if you have the basics covered of web development which is HTML. CSS and Javascript in depth. A quick test for this is if you can tell the difference between var
, let
and const
even if someone woke you up 3 AM in the night without flinching or you can explain hoisting
to a 5-year-old.
Fret not if you cannot, this issue is aimed to cover that ground for you.
One thing I've learned over the years is knowing when to use a reference vs when to use a resource for learning.
For anything web-related MDN docs are excellent to learn JS, CSS & HTML from the basics, I highly recommend reading them cover to cover for JS & HTML. Pick up CSS as you require it. Making sure you have a good foundation will reap its rewards in the long run. (Learning resource)
As developers, we tend to Google from time to time (Read: All the time), so whenever you are handicapped with syntax W3Schools is your friend. (Reference)
So make sure you cover the basics first or feel free to learn the basics in parallel if you'd like either way you'd be productive in no-time.
Why
It's 2020. It's a pandemic. Now we don't know when this will end but software is here to stay and you'd have jobs to do for a long time as developers (Till GPT-300 takes over).
I'll try to make a case here for why learning React in 2020 is still a good investment for you.
As someone aiming to be a full-stack or front-end developer you are faced with a few choices for making beautiful web app frontends :
Use a framework like React or Vue or Angular.
Use a library like JQuery.
Use vanilla (plain) JS.
Now if your aim is to make a simple application you could get by using vanilla Javascript or JQuery for that matter.
But if you aim to be a front-end ninja most likely you'd have to learn a framework like React or Vue to do anything complex. (You could do it the old way with JQuery although with a lot of pain)
A quick comparison between React and Vue on the search volume shows that React is searched more compared to Vue. So definitely there are more people using React compared to Vue.
Another reason to choose React is the vast amount of knowledge that there is about the framework (Like this newsletter for example). The more people teaching something means the more people adopting it and the cycle continues.
If this hasn't convinced you yet if you ever want to build desktop or mobile applications you can do that with React. Use react-native
for mobile or use react-native-windows
or react-native-mac
for Windows or Mac. Hell, or just use plain old React with the Electron framework and now you have superpowers not many can possess 🔥.
References
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn
https://github.com/vuejs/vue
https://github.com/facebook/react
https://github.com/electron/electron
https://www.w3schools.com/
Thanks for reading up till now. If you liked what you read let me know! Better yet share it with a pal you know would find this useful this series useful. In the next newsletter, I will be talking about the React ecosystem and what tools you'd need to be React ninja! 😎
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for anything related to tech, startups, and building products.