Lev Lazinskiy

Learning React with Mosh

There have been a number of React related things that have come up in my work lately so I figured it was finally time to buckle down and figure out how it actually works.

My biggest frustration with learning anything related to Javascript is how quickly the ecosystem changes and makes tutorials, courses, and books obsolete.

I was looking through some of the recommended resources on learning react from the React website and came across the Mastering React course which I decided to try out.

I am about halfway through the course now and it has been great so far. Mosh does a great job making this topic approachable. I especially like how he walks you through a specific naive implementation and then takes the time to both explain why it is not ideal, along with walking us through how to refactor our code to make it better.

I also really like how he provides tips and tricks in how to be as efficient as possible in working with React and VS Code. I finally figured out how to effectively use multi-line cursors, move code blocks around, use snippets, and the thing that blew my mind the most so far is “zen coding” which takes a lot of pain out of writing complex and repetitive HTML.

The extensions that I’ve found useful with VSCode are:

1. Simple React Snippets
2. Prettier - Code Formatter
3. Auto Import - ES6, TS, JSX, TSX
4. Sort Imports

If you’re looking an approachable way to dive in and learn React, I would highly recommend this course. I’ve already purchased the follow-on Redux and NodeJS courses, so I will be a full stack developer before you know it.

This blog is the farthest thing from React. In fact, it has no Javascript at all and I plan to keep it that way indefinitely. However there are a number of side projects that I am working on that would greatly benefit from something like React. My plans after this course are to rewrite the Flashy frontend in React and potentially even dabble with React Native to create mobile applications for Flashy.