Review: Getting Started with Redux by Dan Abramov
I have been working with React and Redux for over 9 months now, and I have to say, I love it. I love the community, the way the framework feels, and the philosophies it promotes. Hands down, it’s amazing.
I started off my React journey when one of my business partners kept bringing up react native as a cross platform mobile app solution. Since our team is small (5 people with only 2 developers) maintaining web, iOS and Android platforms was challenging.
I researched courses that could get me up to speed quickly and came across Stephen Grider’s “The Complete React Native and Redux Course.” I dove right in with the goal of rebuilding one of our apps in React Native. Not only did this course seem well reviewed but the content was directly applicable to our tech stack so it was a perfect fit.
After completing this course, I wanted to know more about React. Prior to using it, we were writing web apps in Angular 1. Angular was a nice step up from plain html or jinja templating but stepping into React felt like all the weird things that didn’t feel natural went away.
Getting Started with Redux by Dan Abramov
I came across another course for Redux weeks ago but couldn’t seem to find the time to go through it until this week. I always felt like I knew Redux pretty well, however I never felt like I knew it at the level of being able to teach it. I thought, if nothing else, completing this course could make me feel more confident about doing things correctly, as well as give me the ability to teach my teammates all about the library.
I must say that I fell in love with this course; it’s awesome! I was excited to find a course this detailed, thorough, and accessible.
Why, you ask?
It’s Free
With React’s popularity — and thus by consequence Redux’s popularity — there are a ton of great learning resources out there for Redux. I started by paying for courses on Udemy, and I soon found that a lot of free ways to get access useful material exist on many similar platforms. This is certainly one of them.
Accessible
I found the information in this course to be presented in such a way that beginners to Redux and React could keep up; so much so that I have sent it to all of my coworkers who are just starting out.
The course takes the time to make sure you are keeping up and attacks concepts in a way that makes you feel like you could do it yourself. From fundamental principles to solid examples, you get a feel of the core assumptions of redux. From there the course takes you through building a ToDo app where you see the principles in action, in addition to seeing how Redux and React have evolved together to solve different developer problems.
Quick and Thorough
This is where I thought the course went above and beyond. The course is made up of 30 videos with most lasting about 4 minutes each. This allowed me to get through the course in three sittings throughout the week, however someone could very feasibly do it all in one sitting.
Even with how quickly you can move through this course, Dan does a great job of keeping a consistent flow to each video and section. He takes the time to recap information from previous videos, walks you through the lesson, and clearly recaps each time. I think this is nice for people who want to make sure they understand the holistic process.
Each section is handled in a way where Dan walks you through the problem, most basic solution, writes an abstraction which is similar to the standard way, and finally implements the standard way of using redux (typically implementing the react-redux provided function). By taking this approach, his course extends its audience from those new to Redux to people who have been using Redux for a while. I, and I think many others, read docs and stack overflow posts and see people simply say:
import { … } from ‘react-redux’and use the provided functionality. This usually completely solves the problem and most people move on. Dan’s course takes it a step further in making me feel like I actually understand not only what these functions do but also how they came to be. Dan shows you the problems developers ran into while redux was being adopted and what they created to solve it. This was huge to me.
I really enjoyed this course and I wanted others to know that it’s worth a watch. If you are just getting into Redux or have been using it for a while, take a couple hours in your week and give it a try.
