I set a goal to start being productive with React & its ecosystem throughout a week. As the goal was set I had to find out what will be the best approach to achieve it. Trying to comprehend all these Fluxes, Reduxes & Immutable. JS through a course of a couple of days seemed impossible to me. Since I’m usually a book-type of guy, at first I’ve decided to read a book … and then BOOM … i’m a seasoned React pro.
To make a long story short, that didn’t happen. This book can definitely help you to comprehend the basics of using a new framework, but these days it’s not sufficient due to so called “Javascript fatigue”, which can be described in simple terms as a never ending flood of JS-frameworks & libraries you need to learn to comprehend a recently written webapp.
The book is good for beginners, for whom it might be their first introduction to the world of modern apps. Learning the basics didn’t give me much since React has a pretty lean learning curve, which doesn’t require anything but any knowledge of Javascript.
The thing that gave me a lot of pain was Redux, which is de-facto standard in writing React apps these days. Unfortunately the book doesn’t contain much about it apart from its mentioning as well as a link to a Github repo with an app written with Redux in mind.
This manual has helped me more, but to be fair, it’s dedicated to Redux(however, it also explains most of the essential React basics you’d need to be productive). I also reckon that it’s much more lengthier than the reviewed book.
As a Scala developer I find React + Redux very exciting. It’s hard to overestimate how important it is to base front-end apps on robust architecture, which Redux+React helps you to do by obliging you to use some of the best glimpses of Functional programming.
