Show HN: Learn React fundamentals
github.com
github.com
That's why all of my courses are based on real world examples.
For example in https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/ we build a SAAS app with Flask and cover 50+ web dev concepts along the way. Users, accepting payments, invoicing, testing, etc..
What I liked: 1. No grand philosophical statements about functional programming paradigm or how awesome is React. (Most tutorials I have seen spend more ink on these than on the real stuff) 2. Easy way to install the tutorial and validate exercises. 3. Using React to teach React (the tutorial is a React program but this aspect is not emphasized).
My suggestions to the Author: 1. Leverage the fact that the tutorial itself is a React program to go one level deeper. This probably would require its own set of pages, each page emphasizing a different aspect such as Router and other components. It took me a while to appreciate that Components are not only for visual elements but they can also change behavior (example: Router). 2. Use HMR to load only the Solution component so that only that part of the page changes when the reader saves his edits. This will be a great showcase of React's power of applying only delta changes to a page. 3. This is a minor nit: the color of numbers in the tutorial is too close to the color of the background. Please use a different color.
1. Read the book [1] and type every code of his by hand and create a snippet folder. Stop reading this book around two thirds in when he gets too deep on caching and does not much with React.
2. Read the Facebook Hello World tutorial, type everything by hand again and understand it. Add it to your snippet folder.
3. Try to make your own to do list++ app. You can use Google and Stackoverflow but try to remember things first and don't jump back to the Facebook tutorial and the Road to React book. The app I created was a React app in which you could submit your bookmarks and give it a star rating up to 5 stars, it's a feature that I'd really like in Chrome. Add it to your snippet folder
4. Get started with a real project.
In this approach, I think this website would be a good addition or replacement for step 2.
Expectations and goals for each step:
1. Gives you context and insight (you care about context).
2. Gives you insight while having the context.
3. Transfers this knowledge 'to your fingers' a bit, you just feel the idioms in your fingers a bit more when you're done. I.e. practical experience
4. Deepens the practical experience enough for one to say "I am able to program with React."
Start with a project "real" or easy, learn each step as I need it.
A lot of this is copying and pasting code and then modifying it, and then go back and learn what the "basics" are.
More like 3..1...4...2
So in order to do 3, I will have to look at some of the hello world examples (I know nothing at this point). When I am through I may modify it to make it more ambitious, and then might need another resources. (usually stack overflow).
ymmv
I get 3, 1, 4 though. You first dive in practically, then learn the theory and then immediately start on a real project.
I am trying your approach with regards to 2D and 3D plotting on a canvas element.
Also, come by the Reactiflux chat channels on Discord! [2] Always plenty of people hanging out happy to answer questions.
[0] http://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2017/12/blogged-answers-lea...
One of the best books I learnt React when I was starting out was from https://www.fullstackreact.com
I loved the way they broke down concepts and build one on top of the other.
Heads up though: The first exercise seems to have lowercase/uppercase issue where it expects 01-HelloWorld-solution.js but the file is actually named 01-helloWorld-solution.js. The same is true for the exercise itself 01-helloWorld.js ==> 01-HelloWorld.js.
Once you rename them it seems to work just fine!
Agree with other comments that Vue and its companion libraries have much larger API surfaces and have a lot of magic while React's advance techniques can be built upon few basic fundamentals so you need more time to remember those. But I feel that most of APIs are practical solutions to problems you need to fix by yourself in React.
In essence, many things you take for granted do become harder because Vue is modelled after older templating frameworks like Angular, so you're jumping right into DI again and scope separation. It makes it less flexible and simple compared to React. My biggest gripe with it was that for many problems the basic knowledge you have isn't enough, you need Vue-specific solutions (remember the "Angular-way"?). After a while it gets easier.
Fullstack Vue [1]
Vue is for noobs and back-end developers that don't know any better. There's no reason whatsoever to use it after you're familiar with React. Don't buy into the hype. There's lots of things that are intuitive or easy to learn in React, and have to be researched and memorised in Vue. Being a 'Vue' dev is a constant exercise in rote memorisation and remembering how things behave in certain edge cases.
Let me throw out an example I ran into 2 hours ago. I could do this basically any day of the past 6 months and give you a different example.
Say you need to render a component dynamically based on some data. Maybe you have the name of the component in a string (i.e it's come from a back-end etc) and know the scope it lies in, or maybe you're passed a component as a prop (you see this pattern all the time in higher order components in React, i.e '(Component) => <Component />')
In React, you can simply do the above. If you've been programming in React for a while you probably intuitively know that you can just do (Component) => <Component />, why? Because the JSX transform is trivial, and you can do it in your head.
When you render a component in React, you know that the '<Foo />' transpiles down to React.createElement(Foo). It doesn't matter how Foo enters the scope, whether it's imported at the top of the file (and therefore closured into your function) or comes in as a prop, it'll just work. As long as you're familiar with the Javascript language, you'll know this just works.
In Vue, it's not that simple. Because Vue components are all in this complex templating language, you need to look up how to do even slightly advanced things like this. There's always a 'Vue' way to do it, rather than a 'Javascript' way to do it. Or, as in this case, there's a "refactor your entire component to be a render function" way to do it, almost like an 'escape' to using actual JS, because the Vue templating language just isn't good enough to handle what you want it to do.
And god help you when you need to try and figure out the Vue way of doing something via Google instead of having an expert mentor on your team to help. Forget the official docs, they're garbage. And Vue (as well as React, to be fair) has the same problem PHP had 15 years ago, squillions of noobs have just flooded into the ecosystem and resources like Stack Overflow, chat rooms etc are swarming with "slightly experienced noobs" trying to help people a little bit newer than themselves. The quality of online resources is shockingly low. Even if you're an experienced front-end dev and know all the terminology and how to phrase your questions and search queries, there's no guarantee everyone else does, so you'll have to wade through 50 nonsensical answers to every problem you might run into. It's infuriating, inefficient, and soul sucking.
And, you know what, just in general I'd never recommend anyone switch front-end libraries unless you have literally nothing else to do. As far as your personal learning and career progression goes, it's always best to learn how to do something new. Failing that, it's sometimes good to learn a different way of doing something. But the absolute worst thing you can do is learn a different representation of the same way of doing the same thing. Vue and React are the exact same shit. You're better off learning the inner workings of one of them (try building your own, it's fun!) so you can bring that knowledge to the next trendy crap that comes along, rather than trying to learn all the trendy crap.
But I can't.
[edit]
Since somebody downvoted my previous form of comment (probably because of lack of constructive opinion) I'll fix it now:
Calling other programmers noobs doesn't make you a better person by any means.
On one side you're saying that Vue.js is that easy to learn so there's lots of noobs using it, but on the other side you're saying that you need constantly google/look into to docs for help.
Vue documentation is the best introduction to the tool I've ever encountered. Same for the rest of the docs for the Vue's ecosystem - they're written in consistent form, so you can just simply 'jump in' and learn progressively. Even templating language looks like already familiar good old HTML. I was prepared to build production-ready application after a week of messing around with Vue & its documentation.
I can't tell same much good words about React, since after spending a month with it I couldn't figure out how to solve some basic edge-cases (like finding proper way to style components - are you kidding me, React is like 3+ years old, used by thousands of developers and people are still arguing about proper way of styling its components? In Vue you just put it into `<style>` block of Single File Component, or serve generic ones in the global stylesheet file and that's it, simple as that.)
But I think it's just a matter of personal preferences - Vue just suit me better, while React doesn't. I don't like react personally - but I do respect the people who created it and these who uses it on daily basis. Period.
Every developer can choose hers/his tools that suits best, but calling someone because of that a noob is... just unprofessional.
I will take an opportunity and share here a link to one of my notes about the related topic: 'If Vue.js is worth a shot?': https://lukaszkups.net/notes/is-vuejs-worth-a-shot/
enjoy ;)
FWIW I have found the Vue documentation excellent, and there are plenty of resources online to learn as well.
Both React and Vue are great solutions, the approach is just a bit different. This high and mighty attitude of "my thing is great, the other thing sucks" is a detriment to everyone.
And you know what attitude is a detriment to everyone? The attitude that every library in JS land is worthy of praise just for the sole reason of existing. Yeah sure writing libraries is hard, and takes effort, and getting over 9,000 GitHub stars or Twitter follows or whatever the fuck is a great accomplishment, but it's perfectly possible to harm the overall ecosystem by blindly spreading bad abstractions and inferior solutions.
There's really a few big choices for a JS framework now (and of course thousands of small ones). Calling fellow developers who use the second most popular JS framework "noobs" doesn't help your case at all.
I don't care about GitHub stars, nor Twitter follows. I do care about a tool which allows me to achieve what I need to achieve. And in the case of front-end development Vue definitely does this, in a simple to understand and performant way. Judging by its popularity many others agree.
And who gets to decide what is and isn't an "inferior solution"? Thankfully not people like you.
With frameworks like Angular (I don't know about Vue), you always keep the doc open in background because you constantly need to look for a function signature, check what's the syntax for something or how this or that works…
Of course this is anecdata so take it as you will.
For this comment alone, I thought I might downvote you but then you did something quite unexpected: you gave me a detailed example of what you mean.
It is quite compelling if this sort of pattern is widespread.
However, I will learn Vue because, unfortunately, I am still a noob. In a sense it is a recommendation.
Vue is different. With it, you can't confidently use your previous programming experience.
That's not particularly intuitive! It just feels that way because you know it well.
> There's always a 'Vue' way to do it, rather than a 'Javascript' way to do it.
I mean, come on. There's a 'React' way to do almost everything too. Want to create an element? No document.createElement for you, you'll be wanting to import ReactDOM, make a class that extends Component (or make a stateless component via a function. Also not intuitive!), then render that component into the DOM.
Yeah but you just described the entire framework. What he's driving at is that React had a very small API surface area, Vue has a much larger one.
`yarn build` equals `npm run build`
`yarn eject` equals `npm run eject`
and so on ... except install, start and test which work without run.
`npm install`
`npm start`
`npm test`
There is another difference which is about the .lock file, you can delete yarn yarn.lock and keep the package-lock.json that will be generated after you run npm install.
To understand how this affect you need to understand semver and how the lock file works.
Otherwise, if you don't have Yarn installed globally then it uses npm by default in your project.
yarn start
npm run startOr maybe it makes sense to show the TOC by default, with the option to hide it. Either way, I'm curious to hear more about your reasoning for why it's so horrible.
Teachers do need everything in front of them because they have to choose what resource is best to explain, students usually need to focus on one thing and learn it well.
I know this is a post about React (which doesn't it run on Node too), but as framework noob wondering why development has become so arduous vs. build it locally & refresh the page.
Also, the npm module stuff .. i mean some rando in the world updates their module and boom breaks the build for millions everywhere. WHAT? How is this efficient and better then prior to all these frameworks that run on Node?
I'm not sure what angular setup you have there but something is very wrong
Building sites in html/css & JavaScript was a better development UX and faster. This constant compiling even quickly is silly and a fourth of my day is spent doing so.
This is still building sites in HTML/CSS & JS. You can even use React without Webpack if you want to if you are okay with a different syntax, and want to avoid transpiling at all cost.
If you want to have quick iteration cycles for tweaking CSS, you still cleanly separate your CSS from the rest of your component and use something like Storybook. The CSS changes will be detected and autoreloaded near instantly (sub-second).
But yeah, if you want to build robust interactive elements with syntactic sugar, you will have to bite the bullet and accept a bit slower refresh time (2-5 seconds with HMR on most projects I worked on).
Further you can also split up your project in smaller libraries, build and deploy them to a local npm-repository for faster builds.