Learning React

Preface

This book is for developers who want to learn the React library while learning the latest techniques currently emerging in the JavaScript language. This is an exciting time to be a JavaScript developer. The ecosystem is exploding with new tools, syntax, and best practices that promise to solve many of our development problems. Our aim with this book is to organize these techniques, so you can get to work with React right away. We’ll get into Redux, React Router, and build tooling, so we promise not to introduce only the basics and then throw you to the wolves.

This book does not assume any knowledge of React at all. We’ll introduce all of React’s basics from scratch. Similarly, we won’t assume that you’ve worked with ES6 or any of the latest JavaScript syntax. This will be introduced in Chapter 2 as foundation for the rest of the chapters.

You’ll be better prepared for the contents of the book if you’re comfortable with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s almost always best to be comfortable with these big three before diving into a JavaScript library.

Along the way, check out the GitHub repository. All of the examples are there and will allow you to practice with hands-on examples.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable ...