The project I’m on at work has thrown a bunch of us into a deep new technology stack. The front end is being implemented using React.js. I’ve been interested in React for a while now, so I don’t have any inherent objection to learning about it or having to use it, but I’m finding it frustratingly difficult to find any good resources I can use to educate myself. My typical go-to strategy is to work my way through a book to get some footing, but for the life of me I can’t find a book on Amazon (or O’Reilly, or Manning, or Packt publishing) that doesn’t appear to have some serious detractors; plus I get the feeling that React is still evolving quickly enough that a book that’s good in January might be somewhat out of date by July.
So I wanted to see if anyone could recommend any sort of book/online course/training of any sort (cheap!) that would let me hit the ground running. The full stack I’m in is React/ES6/Redux on the front end with Falcor/lots of Netflix OSS microsystems/AWS/Docker/a graph database on the back end. I’m pretty experienced with Javascript and front end development (though not so much ES6).
I don’t have any recommendations for you, but I just started learning Ember and almost came on to make a thread like this, only more general. Do you think we have enough developers on here to get a web technologies thread going?
I’m a slave to C style syntax. Every other language syntax has been ruined for me and I hate javascript frameworks that use a different syntax, since javascript syntax is already “perfect” in my eyes. :/
Edit: And I realize this is like a cook saying I’ll only work with fish. Sigh.
Take a good look at the official docs site; the ‘thinking in react’ section is a great overview of how react apps work and how to think through the design / architecture of your app, and there’s a nice getting started tutorial too.
My book of choice was Rails meets React which was clear and helpful, but obviously less useful if your backend isn’t in fact Rails.
It does still feel like one has to spend a bunch of time scanning blog posts. There’s a lot of great content out there, but it would be nice if someone somewhere had curated it into a good book.
Edit: one of the frustrations of getting started with react, IMO, is trying to sort out the tooling when you really want to concentrate on the app. Babel and Webpack are great, but they’re complex and the docs aren’t awesome. Facebooks Create React App is a really nice tool to get started right away while getting to ignore all the tooling / config issues to start with.
Last recommendation; embrace ES6 , and take a look at using Babel to enable a couple of not-yet-agreed proposed syntax changes; ES6 plus the spread/rest operator on objects and arrow functions as class member functions make for cleaner more readable code.
@Daagar, that create-react-app looks like a nice scaffolding to use when making a new project; unfortunately I’m stepping into an existing one. Part of what’s making my brain hurt is coming up to speed on ES6 in addition to React, Redux, and Falcor at the same time. Yesterday we started digging into some code and ended up discussing the ES6 spread operator and ES6’s compose function (both of which are used extensively in our components), and my brain is, as they say, en fuego!
