How To Learn React JS Fast

react is an incredibly popular choice for building front-end applications and as a result lots of people want to learn it and lots of employers need employees who know react but what's the fastest way to learn it in this video we're going to explore that idea and try and figure out if it's possible to learn react fast so learning is a non-linear path a lot of people might lay it out in a linear fashion because it's easy for us to think about it's like you learn javascript and then you learn react and within react you learn this first and then you learn that no learning is linear learning is an exploration so when you hear somebody say you need to learn the fundamentals of javascript before you learn any react or any kind of you need to learn x before you learn why kind of statement don't really listen to them you need to stop thinking about learning as a linear path and think about learning as a big graph there's lots of nodes in that graph and each of those are chunks of information that you could know and there's certain links between them concepts relate to each other when you're learning you can learn any of those chunks and then you can learn some more and eventually you'll start to see the connections between them and that's when you start to build up a richer picture and your understanding becomes richer and better and you know more and then the more you know the more you have the ability to learn more and every time you learn something it will strengthen your knowledge of the related concepts but when you hear somebody say you need to learn javascript before you learn react it's like yes some things in react will be easier to understand if you know that piece of javascript beforehand but then you could also go the other way and say if you learn that piece of react when you go back and finally learn the fundamental of javascript you now have a real-world application of that thing and you're going to understand it better so it's not about learn javascript before react it's about everything you learn builds upon the things you knew previously and it works both ways if you learned react and then you picked up the javascript fundamentals you'll understand a lot of that better because you have concrete examples but if you learned the fundamentals first and then went to react you'll be able to discern what's a javascript piece of syntax versus what specifically react and that will make picking up the react easier so whichever you learn second becomes easier because you knew the first but if you do it in a different order it doesn't make it any harder to learn learning is hard anyway so don't try and dumb it down that's not the goal the goal is to just progressively build upon what you already know and link concepts together not in a linear way but in a graph but with that out the way let's jump into the specifics of how i think you can go about learning react a little faster point one might seem a little obvious but it needs to be said because a lot of people including myself kind of skipped this one in the early days and the point is read the react documentation because honestly it's incredible i've been around the world of tech for several years now and there is some documentation that is terrible and there's some pretty good documentation out there as well and react is really one of the best it's incredibly well written it doesn't assume any prior knowledge it really just walks you through what you need to know and points you in the right direction if there's further knowledge required or would be helpful on a certain topic it will link out to other people's blogs or other people's courses so you can learn a bit more about that topic but you really don't need to do that because the documentation itself is very very good so do yourself a favor and read that documentation they even have some tutorials where they'll walk you through building a small application if you're more of a hands-on learner so they have you covered on both sides if you're hands-on they've got you if you prefer to learn the theory first and then dive in later they've got you on that front as well so if you read the react documentation you'll have a pretty good idea of what react is and what it's all about then it comes to actually diving into stuff and building things my biggest point here is simplify and this is a big issue i see with a lot of tutorial content out there online they focus on the whole ecosystem around react when they're espousing that they're teaching a beginner's react tutorial but they're teaching full-scale react that you would see at a company where you've got full build tools and pipelines for like the build process and stuff you need to know that stuff if you're going to be a professional react developer but when you're just learning react you need to simplify you need to know about what is react versus what's a build tool around it and if you're trying to learn them both it's going to get tangled in your mind and it's going to be harder to understand and then you're not going to know if you're learning about a particular build tool or some other tooling around the ecosystem or if you're learning some specific react thing so you need to strip all of the the tooling away and focus just on learning react and it is actually possible to run react in the browser without a build tool and that's in my opinion how you should start because that's the simplest way where you can really isolate what you're learning and focus on react once you've got that react knowledge down you can then focus on the tooling outside of it it's going to be way easier to pick up the tooling because you understand where the boundary between the tool and react lies and then when you can separate the two and you already know one of them you can now focus on the other and then you're having a focused learning every step of the way you're learning react you learned that now you're learning the tool and it's focused every step of the journey and this is an idea that's been researched a lot when it comes to how humans learn and it's called chunking the way chunking works is we need to learn small pieces of information and then we can start grouping those pieces of information into chunks and then as we learn more we can group chunks into larger chunks and it keeps going in this kind of hierarchical way you can think about say a game of chess where you've got a grand master who's one of the best players in the world playing against the complete amateur they're looking at the same chessboard they have the same information the grandmaster looks at it with one glance and they have such deep chunking in their brain that they know these combination of pieces means these kinds of threats and these kind of strategic ideas and these kind of tactical ideas and all of that is going through their mind at lightning speed just by looking at the board and they're seeing the whole structure where somebody like me who's a very beginner basic chess player i don't have that knowledge i don't have all of those chunks that they have so i have to look at each individual piece and then ask myself how does that piece move oh yeah that's a bishop it moves diagonally so which squares can i go to and i have to calculate that for each individual piece the level of chunking that i've got is on the peace level and even on an individual square level i don't see larger things the grand master would see and if i was to learn chess i can't come in from the top and try to think about chess the way the grandmaster thinks about it i have to start from the bottom and start growing the chunks upwards by learning the basics and building on top and that's how you need to approach all learning by approaching react in the way that a professional developer sees react is like learning chess like a grandmaster plays it it's just not going to work it's too complex you don't want to learn the build tooling and the pipelines and continuous integration and all of these things when you're already struggling with the syntax of react it just won't work you need to learn react outside of the build tools and all of that once you've got that then you start chunking and layering in things to improve your knowledge and increase your overall ability with react i think tools like create react app really do a great job in improving that beginner experience because they're abstracting a lot of the tools away from you if you're really trying to learn it i think you should even avoid create react app and at least for the first several hours of your journey and react just write react in the browser which is possible you can even have like jsx in the browser if you know what to do and those are the kinds of tutorials that i think we should be seeing for react those the kinds of tutorials that i'm going to be creating because i think that's the most value so moving on to point number two this is in a similar vein forget best practices best practices are out there to help professional production grade applications scale both in terms of scaling the team who's working on it but also scaling the amount of users who can use it and that's why we have best practices because it makes things like that easier if you're just beginning react you don't need to worry about any of that that's not what you need to worry about it's like the grandmaster and me playing chess again stop approaching it like a grandmaster approaches it approach it like a beginner because you are a beginner it's it's really that simple so forget about best practices in fact actively breaking best practices is a great way to learn because the best practice is the best practice for a reason and if you go against it you're gonna run into the issues potentially of why that best practice became a thing in the first place you're gonna make the mistakes and you're gonna be like ah this is really difficult because i did it that way i really wish i had done it differently and if you do that you might actually find you derive the best practices yourself now you know why they're useful that's way more valuable than just following somebody else's best practice because you figured it out on your own you're gonna remember why you're not just going to be like oh what's that thing that i read on that medium article that i have to do i can't really remember but you'll definitely remember if it's like i remember that code i wrote that was terrible and i hated myself because it didn't work right and it was really hard to add things that's why i need to do it this way you'll remember that so forget best practices and if anything actively push back against them and try things because learning is about exploration not following rigid rules so if you're just blindly following best practices you are not exploring so you are limiting the learning potential and once you've learned react and you've made a ton of mistakes you're now in a position to learn the best practices because you'll understand why they're there and you can now focus on learning those in isolation which goes back to the chunking idea so point number three is just build things build anything build everything it doesn't matter you need to make mistakes and the best way to make mistakes is just try build stuff build hard stuff build easy stuff build big stuff build small stuff it doesn't matter just be building there's just absolutely no substitute for this when it comes to learning you need to just be building stuff and just pick anything copy things find your favorite applications try copy it it doesn't even have to be a full application you like like a button on a particular website that has some cool hover states try build that you like the particular card or something i don't know try build it quantity is the key here the quality can come later you just need as much experience as possible and just don't get bogged down on what should i build i see a lot of beginners where like i just don't know what to build and and i get that because you're trying to build something good it doesn't matter if it's good you just need to build a lot of things most of it's not going to be good but you have to get through that if you're going to build something good later because you're not you're building good skills not good applications so just go for it it doesn't matter if you're building something you're doing nothing wrong and then point number four is kind of related to everything that i've just said and that's just experiment just explore and experiment go crazy just ask yourself wacky questions like what happens if i build this entire application as just a single big component i don't know try it see how that works for you go the complete opposite way can i make the smallest possible components every tiny little thing as a component and then i can pose everything together to make the bigger application try that as well just come up with as many ridiculous ideas as you can and see if it works see what it does like most of it is not going to be good but you've explored and that's where you're learning like i've said before need to understand where the extreme boundaries of possibility are if you're going to feel comfortable in the center and when you're writing real production professional applications in react you're going to be living in the center most of the time because that's where the good code lies you're not going to be using one component as your entire application with no sub components but you've done that so you understand the benefits and weaknesses of that approach and all the other wacky approaches you tried and you have just a much better well-rounded knowledge of the whole space of react rather than just the quote-unquote good part of react if you understand the solution space you can apply things much better because you feel much more comfortable doing so and you'll be a much better developer for it as well because you will have seen things through all sorts of different ways that most people have never seen because they've never tried it and it's that kind of thing that's going to bring true skill and inspiration to you in the future so to round everything out my tips to learn react as fast as possible one read the react documentation two simplify start on the smallest possible chunks and build up from there just forget about tooling point number three forget about all best practices and if anything actively go against them point number four build things lots of things as many things as you can and point five just experiment go crazy have crazy ideas and try it and if you do all of that i promise you you will become a very very good react developer very quickly so that's everything for this video i hope you enjoyed it give me a big thumbs up if you did and if you disagree with any of these points let me know in the comments i'd love to have a discussion about this because i am truly passionate about learning and teaching all topics but in this case especially react so i'd love to hear anybody who disagrees strongly with me because maybe i'll learn a thing or two as well and then we're all winners if you do like what i'm doing hit that subscribe button hit the bell to get notified for every video that i upload but until next time stay hungry and keep coding

Channel: Hungry Turtle Code

Views: 24,335

Rating: 4.975091 out of 5

Keywords: how to learn react js fast, how to learn react js, how to learn react, learn react js fast, how to learn react fast, how to learn react faster, fastest way to learn react js, learn react js, fastest way to learn react, learn react, learn react fast, react advice, learning react

Id: 7Okuzbj0F4Y

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020