Before You React

When Natalie and Nathan decided to embark upon a second plugin together, they thought, “Let’s build something cool. And use the API! And React.js! We are smart people. We will just learn it all in an afternoon.” Little did they know that you can’t just learn React. It’s tied into all kinds of other tools and technologies. Online tutorials were more confusing than helpful. They all used different conventions and contradicted one another.

After several false starts, a lot of time spent traveling down wrong paths, and a lot of defeat and frustration, they finally hit a stride. They figured out how to learn what they did not know they needed to learn.

In this talk, Natalie and Nathan will discuss all those skills and technologies they had to learn before diving into React. They will cover EcmaScript 6, Node, Babel, Webpack, Flux, and Redux. We will talk about the things that led us astray that we learned to avoid.

What You’ll Learn

• What React is and how it can benefit you
• React and Performance
• Component Lifecycle
• Recommended tools to know before using React
  • npm
  • Webpack
  • Babel
• Recommended approaches to implementing React
• What you need to know about functions
• JavaScript modules
• Two JavaScript operators
  • Rest
  • Spread