Beginner’s guide to React Native. What is React Native?

Hello world! Before diving into React Native lets consider some facts. The Digital world is expanding exponentially with every new user getting involved with it. And hence the usage of electronic gadgets are also tremendously increasing.

The recent study has shown that people often prefer mobile phones over the messy laptops and large gadgets. The mobiles are handy, light-weight, portable and most-importantly powerful.

Due to this fact the Digital world is accepting Mobile phones as their primary Digital ally. Our Mobile Developer community is increasing in rapid pace daily. This is the reason tech giants are flowing development frameworks and technologies continuously.

Since beginning the native mobile application development community has been building applications using traditional languages like objective-c, swift, Java ( Android Development) etc.

The notion of Hybrid Application Development arrived after few years that has the ability to build cross-platform mobile applications.

The world became so easy for developers as work became cost efficient for the companies as they don’t had to build two separate app for two different platforms.

To name a few like phonegap- ionic framework, cordova etc. But you know every pros has a cons and so does the hybrid apps. They lacked in performance drastically and stopped the developer community to build complex projects.

So there always remained a plus point for native development.

The dream of building cross-platform native apps has been accomplished by Facebook, as they introduced React Native.

It is the technology that can be used to build cross-platform native apps using our old class JavaScript skills. This brought a smile in developer community and also a revolution in mobile application development.

So what are the prerequisites?

To be honest, you must be a pro in java script and to the latest edition of ECMA script i.e., ES6/ES2015. Starting from variables, functions to loops and all the essential syntactical parts. You can learn ES6 in depth here. You if you want to have a quick read. You can visit this site. Learn ES6 as thoroughly, understand the concepts and the changes that occurred since the old school Java script like fat arrow, arrow functions etc.

Once you master java script, a little knowledge of react would be a cherry on top of your ice-cream. Want to learn React Native directly? No issues, you can learn. But fundamentals of react would be very much helpful to capitalize React Native very easily.

Coming to the hardware part, a 8GB RAM machine would be a good choice, if you use emulator throughout your development cycle. You can use popular text editors like atom, sublime text or visual studio code.

React Native has been loved so much and so its powerful capabilities that many companies has adopted this technology as their primary tool of development.

Popular apps like Netflix, Instagram, Airbnb, Myntra are built using React Native.

The Recent survey shows there has been increasing demand for React Native developers and the trend is going to grow further as its community is increasing rapidly. So what are you waiting for. Make your hands dirty with React Native and experiment the things. Finally happy coding!!

Originally published at www.siliconbuddy.com on March 21, 2018.