Yeah, like any other set of abstractions, there's value in understanding what's going on underneath the hood with Webpack and Babel. I just don't want that to

Yeah, like any other set of abstractions, there's value in understanding what's going on underneath the hood with Webpack and Babel. I just don't want that to be a blocker for anyone who is trying to learn React, especially if they're relatively new to web development in the first place. As an example, there was a large tutorial article about a year ago called "Cloning Yelp". It was an extremely well-written, in-depth tutorial that demonstrated how to build a fairly advanced real-world-ish example app, including use of routing, AJAX, CSS, and wrapping Google Maps. Unfortunately, the first third of the article was devoted to setting up a production-quality Webpack+Babel config. The HN thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11778663 ) hit about 250 comments, and most of the discussion was complaints about build setup and "Javascript Fatigue". In contrast, a React tutorial that uses CRA as its starting point can pretty much just start with "Run `npm install -g create-react-app; create-react-app myapp; cd myapp; npm start;` ". There's always time to learn Webpack and Babel later, after you're comfortable with React itself. (Oh, and thanks for the links list endorsement :) )