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Learn React JS: Top 5 Tutorials To Get Started

Allison Reed

Are you into front-end development and keep your eye on recent trends in the field? If yes, I bet that you’ve heard a lot about the miraculous React JS, which all the web developers are crazy about. Probably you wonder, whether it’s all just a fade, or whether it’s worth your time and effort. In this post, we’ll dig into such questions as what React JS is, and how to learn it. Then, we’ll bring you the top 5 tutorials to get started and learn React JS effectively. Ready? Let’s go!

Figuring Out What React JS Is

React JS is a recently created JavaScript library that gives new opportunities to UI engineers and front end developers. The most powerful thing in React is that it’s able to quickly render data-driven changes in UIs. Moreover, React can be used not only for developing top-notch UIs but also for building apps for Android and IOS with React Native. React is great as it easily combines with other JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery, AngularJS, Redux, and others.

There are pretty big and authoritative cheeses that stand behind this JavaScript library. It was initially developed by Facebook in 2012 to upgrade their newsfeed. In 2012 it was picked up by Instagram and got a new impulse of its development. After becoming open-source in 2013, React JS saw a flux of new developers from all over the world picking up on it. The next step toward React popularity was the release of React Native in 2015. That year, it became possible to build apps for Android, IOS, and UWP with React.

Reasons To Go For React or Why It’s Worth Your Effort

If you wonder whether it’s worth to learn React JS, there multiple reasons to go for it, and we’ll discuss them below.

Having said this, learning React JS is a good investment into your future as a web developer. React JS developers are bound to be demanded in years to come and the library keeps developing and transforming actively. However, the question that arises is how to get started with it the right way. We’ll try to solve this dilemma in the next section of this article.

In the meanwhile, here comes one of the beautiful examples of what you can build with React. Keep inspired and dive head first into learning!

How To Learn React JS: Top 5 React JS Tutorials

If you want to master React, expect a pretty steep learning curve. Let’s say, you already have some pretty sound knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (if you don’t, master them first). Googling a ‘React JS Tutorial’ is not the right way to jump-start it all.

Unfortunately, not all the tutorials on the web proved to be good. You’ll stumble over multiple tutorials that don’t actually show you how it all works and how to do things with React. They pretty much pull some ready-made examples in front of you and offer you to re-create them by yourself. These are not the tutorials you need to grasp the gist of React.

That’s why in this post we bring you the top 5 React JS tutorials that show how things work from the inside out. The top 5 React JS tutorials below are presented in the logical order from the least to the most complex one. This will help you gradually build up your skills and grow from React JS beginner to an advanced user. Let’s get started!

#1: Build With React Tutorial

Build With React Tutorial is the simplest one in this set. It’s ideal for complete React newbies and helps you the gist of what you’re going to dig into. Fortunately, it’s written in simple and precise language and tells you all the basic information you need to know.

The tutorial is divided into 6 parts: Intro, JSX, Components, Events, State, Virtual DOM. Every part comes with examples and interactive exercises with JSFiddle. So, with this tutorial, you get a chance to learn how it all works, as well as get your first hands-on experience of coding with React JS.

#2: Learning React JS: Getting Started and Concepts

The second one in our list, this Learn React JS tutorial is also for beginners but it goes into a greater detail explaining the basic concepts of React JS. From this tutorial, you’ll learn how to get started building your first React component, what’s Virtual DOM, JSX, props, specs, states and lifecycle methods.

The features that helped this tutorial make it to the top, are that it’s well-structured, detailed and answers all the questions that a React newbie may have.

#3: React JS Video Course

If you want to learn React JS online with an tutor, then you’ll fall in love with this beginner’s video course on React. With it, you can see how it all works in live time and will get quickly up to the pace of React development.

Completing the whole course won’t take much time as every video tutorial is no more than 10 minutes long. In the course, you’ll find the following aspects covered: introduction and workspace setup, components and rendering, combining multiple React files, states, props and application data, etc. Check out the first tutorial in the series to get the hang of it:

#4: The Official React JS Tutorial by Facebook

This one is a good fit for those who’ve completed the beginner’s stage. The tutorial also covers just the duo of React and JSX, leaving the dev tools, such as Webpack and Babel out. The tutorial brings multiple examples of client/server interaction, and you’ll have to run a local server on your PC to try them out.

Actually, what the official React JS tutorial does is that it teaches you to build a full-fledged tic-tac-toe game. You’ll develop a UI for the game, store the history of the moves, indicate the winner, etc. On the journey with the tutorial, you’ll learn many ways you can use React library and get some sound knowledge.

#5: Comprehensive React.js Guide by Tyler McGinnis

The last one in our Top 5 is a long read. However, this is an advanced tutorial, so it would be rather surprising if it had been short. Consequently, if you follow along and take time to do the practice part of it, it would take you a couple of hours to accomplish just the part one of the tutorial.

Notwithstanding the fact that the tutorial is long, it’s written in comprehensive language and speaks directly to the reader. It answers all the questions you might have about React and leaves you completely satiated with the knowledge you gained.

The first part of the tutorial is a comprehensive guide on creating an app with React. Next, the second one teaches you to utilize Webpack and Babel. Then, the third part comes that instructs you on building React apps with Gulp and Browserify. Last, comes the part on architecting React apps with Flux.

Wrapping Up

Today, you learned what React JS is and why it’s worth mastering. This powerful JS library lets you do miracles in terms of building fast-responding, flexible and scalable user interfaces that rock. What’s more, now you know how to learn React JS as you have the top 5 tutorials on board to bring a complete React newbie advanced knowledge of the framework. Dive in, have fun, and add React JS to your tech stack. I wish you good luck in this!

Stay tuned!