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You're absolutely right - the power and benefits of libraries like Redux are so obvious once you've grokked React but as a beginner it really is just going to s

You're absolutely right - the power and benefits of libraries like Redux are so obvious once you've grokked React but as a beginner it really is just going to slow you down or just get in the way of learning. This is partly because of the overhead of having to learn another library, and partly because you have to learn by making mistakes, experiencing the pain, and then badly hand-implementing parts of Redux yourself to truly understand its value, and how it should be used. At that point you're way beyond beginner level. Same goes for '8. Use JSX, ES6, Babel, Webpack, and NPM' - JSX aside, setting up this tool stack is totally unnecessary for a beginner getting started hacking on a Hello World app. This is something you do after you've learned React, and you want to use use it in a 'real' project. Depending on your knowledge of these tools it could take literally days of work to get started. I'll be honest, if someone with no knowledge of React asked me how to get into it, I'd also be tempted to mention Redux or Relay, the tool stack, all those things in the React ecosystem that are fantastic and essential for a real production React stack. But it's just too much information, it's not what a beginner wants or needs to know. I think there's a general lesson here - learning frameworks, how they fit together, and what tooling to use is really complicated and only seems 'obvious' once you have the big picture. You have to remember what it felt like when you were a beginner, and just wanted to learn the basic rudiments of React itself - that's more than complicated enough to get started with. When giving advice to beginners, it needs to be laser-focused, ignoring everything but the exact thing they're interested in learning. Forget about all the extra stuff they'll need in the 'real world' - they'll figure that out along the way anyway.

mikeryan 11y ago
Same goes for '8. Use JSX, ES6, Babel, Webpack, and NPM' - JSX aside, setting up this tool stack is totally unnecessary for a beginner getting started hacking on a Hello World app. While I agree with you in theory, in practice learning how to use Babel/JSX and probably es6 are pretty essential to react. All the tutorials are written using JSX which necessitates a transpiler. And a ton of the supporting libraries are now in es6. If you are going to use react you're really going to need to figure out the es6 tool chain.
- davnicwil 11y ago
  Agreed - I did say JSX aside :-) JSX is coupled so tightly with React, and such a large part of React's offering, that learning React without JSX is probably actually going to slow down learning for the opposite reasons. In general, ES6 is a prerequisite for developing anything in JS for any developer/project with a forward-looking mentality in 2016 - but I do have to disagree that knowing ES6 is essential for learning React. They're actually completely orthogonal at this point - it allows for cleaner code but doesn't buy you anything at all in terms of learning the React concepts. As for getting started on the Babel toolchain - again it's orthogonal to learning React. The in-browser JSX transpiler is available. You can start learning react in a single page of html with script tags, just pulling all the libraries off cdns. There's just no need to have a tool chain at all, it is not essential. I think it comes down to the definition of beginner. If you're taking a very experienced JS developer and starting them on a real world React project, by all means go in at the deep end - they'll likely know most of the toolchain anyway and they'll need it. If you're talking about just giving someone an intro to React and its concepts, you have to separate the core from the ecosystem. My point was that we should recognise the difference, this is a common problem where experienced users tell beginners to 'just use' things that take months to become accustomed to in a few throwaway sentences, because to them it is just that easy. To a real beginner it represents a massive ramp, and that's not what you want when just trying to get an intro to a specific library.

mikeryan 11y ago

Same goes for '8. Use JSX, ES6, Babel, Webpack, and NPM' - JSX aside, setting up this tool stack is totally unnecessary for a beginner getting started hacking on a Hello World app. While I agree with you in theory, in practice learning how to use Babel/JSX and probably es6 are pretty essential to react. All the tutorials are written using JSX which necessitates a transpiler. And a ton of the supporting libraries are now in es6. If you are going to use react you're really going to need to figure out the es6 tool chain.

davnicwil 11y ago
Agreed - I did say JSX aside :-) JSX is coupled so tightly with React, and such a large part of React's offering, that learning React without JSX is probably actually going to slow down learning for the opposite reasons. In general, ES6 is a prerequisite for developing anything in JS for any developer/project with a forward-looking mentality in 2016 - but I do have to disagree that knowing ES6 is essential for learning React. They're actually completely orthogonal at this point - it allows for cleaner code but doesn't buy you anything at all in terms of learning the React concepts. As for getting started on the Babel toolchain - again it's orthogonal to learning React. The in-browser JSX transpiler is available. You can start learning react in a single page of html with script tags, just pulling all the libraries off cdns. There's just no need to have a tool chain at all, it is not essential. I think it comes down to the definition of beginner. If you're taking a very experienced JS developer and starting them on a real world React project, by all means go in at the deep end - they'll likely know most of the toolchain anyway and they'll need it. If you're talking about just giving someone an intro to React and its concepts, you have to separate the core from the ecosystem. My point was that we should recognise the difference, this is a common problem where experienced users tell beginners to 'just use' things that take months to become accustomed to in a few throwaway sentences, because to them it is just that easy. To a real beginner it represents a massive ramp, and that's not what you want when just trying to get an intro to a specific library.