My Path (until now) into React: A learning path
A little about me
Before talking about React, I’ll talk a little how I got there. I work with web development since 2009 and the first technologies that I worked with were: HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. I always worked as a “Full Stack Developer” because I started to work as a freelancer, so I had to pick up projects, build them from scratch and put them into production all by myself.
JavaScript and PHP are my main technologies (the ones I have more experience and that I’m more comfortable working with). I’m not an expert in anything, I’m not proud to say that, but the circumstances led me to be more a “generalist” person and that sucks when you have Impostor Syndrome. Nowadays I can work well with any technologies (currently I’m working with Java and I’m loving to learn Go), but being a “generalist developer” is hard because a lot of people judge me for that and I don’t blame them for that. I’m not here to talk about me, so let’s leave that to another time and focus on what’s important.
The road into React
Some years ago I started to learn about Angular 1.x and the skills I got with it gave me some really good opportunities to work on amazing projects with amazing people. By the way this led me to work with a friend of mine that later would be the “door” for me to move from Brazil to Portugal.
When Angular 2 was in it first steps I was studying it a lot, but I wasn’t liking too much to work with it, so I decided to try something new. Some time ago I already made a PoC with Vue.js and loved it, but I tried something new: React, but at the time that “HTML on JS stuff” (yup, now I see how dumb I was) was really strange to me, so I decided to learn more about Vue.js and use it in my projects.
React became very popular, everyone was talking about it and last year I decided to give it another chance. For my own surprise, the JSX syntax was not strange to me anymore and I saw that I could use a lot of concepts that I was already using in Vue.js with React and I loved it. Since then I started to read, study and talk about it. I still use and love Vue.js, but I’m loving to learn and work (on my personal projects and some freelances) with React.
Learning Path
I don’t know if this will be useful, but I’ll share some resources and tips with you (maybe someone that’s reading this is lost in how to begin with React) that I used on my journey until now and share what are my “next steps” in this endless journey on learning how to solve problems, because one thing that I say a lot is: We developers/engineers aren’t paid to code, we’re paid to solve problems. But to do that we need to know the best tools and technologies available out there and most important: we need to know what are the right questions to ask and know what to look for.
Resources:
- The official docs: there’s no better place to learn something, the docs can help you learn from basic to advanced topics, so check it out right now!!!
- The Beginner’s Guide to ReactJS by Kent C. Dodds: this course is amazing, when I saw it I was already working with React for some time, but seeing how Kent explains it’s awesome. I led some workshops before and sometimes I still do and I wish I had this didactic. xD
- React Holiday by michael chan: another amazing resource, with this you can learn React with small lessons, in each lesson you will learn one or more React and JavaScript concepts and at the end of it your skills will be on another level. Another example of amazing didactic skill.
- React Enlightenment by cody lindley: one more amazing resource to learn React and its concepts. A Gitbook with a lot of content that you must know to be a good React developer.
- Advanced React Component Patterns by Kent C. Dodds: do you want to take your skills to another level? So you NEED to take a look at this course. With a simple and clear language, Kent will show you patterns to take your game to another level!!! At the end of this course you’ll have the skills to take a look at that project you started and turn it into an AWESOME product!!! ;)
- React Patterns by michael chan: a walkthrough on many common patterns to use in your projects with a simple language and many examples.
Tips:
- Pick some articles to read daily: https://medium.com/tag/reactjs
- Twitter is a great place for developers and there you can follow a lot of people that can post things related to what you’re learning, so you can take a look at this article by Dan Abramov to see a list of people that you should follow if you’re interested on React
- I also use this list to keep up-to-date with React related stuff.
- Read the source code!!! Yes, it’s one of the best things you can do, reading the source code of libraries, frameworks, etc, is a great way to improve your skills. You will learn a lot seeing how other people do things and you can even see something that can be improved and help the project with it!!! xD
- Practice… yes, just reading things isn’t a great way to improve your skills…
Conclusion
I hope that this article can help you with something!!! I really love to talk about software development, career, games, music, animes and movies. If you want to, just ping me at:
