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Show HN: I wrote a good React book / website
Pre-covid, I was traveling full time to teach ReactJS to corporate clients. My students (mostly developers at banks and insurance companies) would ask me 'What's a good React book?' and I would struggle to recommend something, knowing that all the books sucked or were really out of date. When all my face-to-face training work dried up and I really didn't want to do online training, I magically got a contract to write a book.
I started by reading all of the best-selling books on React, and, yeah, they were all really out of date, incomplete, or just wrong.
As I started writing what I hoped would be a really good React book, I also wanted the website to be something useful and a notch above a typical book website. So, I tried to have working examples of the code listings on the site and to organize them in a way that would make them useful for when I started teaching again, or for anyone who doesn't want to buy a book and just wants to see how things are done.
The book just came out today! The website isn't perfect or done, but here it is: https://reactjsfoundations.com .
How'd I do?
- cminnick 5y agoclickable link: https://reactjsfoundations.com https://reactjsfoundations.com
- dsmmcken 5y agoCongrats on launching your book. I would invest more in the design of your site, it looks dated and makes me assume the content of the book itself is thus dated. It would be nice to see a sample, maybe consider publishing the first couple chapters in full so readers could preview the accompanying writing. The rest of the content could use more introduction, as without the accompanying book it offers little value. The code samples would also benefit from syntax highlighting, and next/previous navigation. Your readers are likely at least familiar with the reactjs.org live jsx editor examples, and I would consider that as baseline to compare against in terms of example functionality.
- cminnick 5y agoThanks for the great feedback! I'm pretty much going to take your suggestions and make a todo list out of them. I agree with all of it. -Chris
- cminnick 5y agoA start: https://www.reactjsfoundations.com/listing309 https://www.reactjsfoundations.com/listing309 . Now to figure out an easy way to do the next/prev nav....