Getting Started

See why you should take this course and what you will learn.

We'll cover the following

What is this course about?

The primary goal of this course is to give you an in-depth introduction to React, tackle advanced features, and teach you as many best practices to develop exceptional React applications. Our goal is to help you understand how the different components of React work under the hood and to grasp why they work in that way.

React

Who should take this course?

This course targets those programmers who are well-versed in Javascript but have little to no experience with React app development. In summary, this course is for those who are new to React but not to Javascript.

Prerequisites

As described previously, this course is intended to be an introduction to React and not an introduction to JavaScript. We assume you have a basic understanding of JavaScript and an understanding of its inner workings. However, we still aim to explain every component within this course thoroughly.

This means that even if you have only used JavaScript in a superficial or broad sense, you will still be able to understand most of the material covered in this course.

We do not assume that you can recite the internals of a JavaScript interpreter from memory, but that you know broader ideas like the basics of scope in JavaScript, what a callback is, how Promise.then() and Promise.catch() work, and how to make use of asynchronous programming with JavaScript.

JavaScript

But don’t worry: It all sounds more complicated than it actually is. Anyone who has previously worked with something like jQuery can quickly work through the examples in this course.

What to expect?

Every developer has different opinions on which methods are best and how to write simple, elegant, and efficient code. There are always several ways to publish your application, creating a bundle with tools such as Browserify, Rollup, or Webpack. You can write your components as ES2015 classes or decide to use createClass from the old ES5 times.

Whenever we think it’s necessary, we will show you the various well-established methods and also some alternatives. Furthermore, we’ll delve deeper into the most modern, current, popular, and the easiest methods to use React.

This is why we have chosen to use Webpack, Babel, and ES2015+ for most of the code examples. Worry not, though – we’ll discuss this in more detail later in the course.

If you’re new to ES2015+, it might take a little time to work through some of the examples. However, we’ll try our utmost to keep the examples concise and explain things further if necessary.