We’re finally on React. I’m loving it. I have been tinkering with React for a couple of years, maybe since 2017, and I’ve gone through many tutorials where I learned the basics. The first time I attempted their Tic Tac Toe tutorial was rough and I got stuck halfway through. But on my second try I got it working. I have built a couple of small projects wit React as well. In sum, I’m not entirely new to React, so this week went buttery smooth for me.

On day one we went through the very basics and jumped right in with using create-react-app. We created our first functional components with JSX. We were shown how to style JSX elements and use { expressions } within JSX.

Day two we did props and state with class based Components. We did the classic increment and decrement counter exercise and ended the day working with a Friendlist app that grabbed local data from a JSON file and rendered them individually into FriendListCard components.

On the final day we worked with forms, onChange handlers, used Axios to make API calls, and we were introduced to ReactRouter.

This was a lot condensed into three days. React is described as a simple library for creating user interfaces, and it is, but that’s only if you’re at least decent at JavaScript. I remember the first time I tried out React I was completely baffled by it, but that’s because I didn’t have the fundamentals of JS locked down yet. For example, if you don’t understand the basics of classes and class constructors, the whole class based components thing, with the this keyword jumping around everywhere, this is gonna be very confusing. See what I did there?

Next week we’re jumping into Hooks and it looks like the remainder of the Bootcamp will be React based.

Only 5 weeks to go!