Part III: Narrowing Focus

After choosing to learn React, I decided to go on it as deep as I can, because I learned that the best thing you can do for your career is tobecome an expertin particular topic. Writing articles for this blog is one of many ways for becoming an expert in this area ofReact&React Native.

Being a beginner, it's a good time to check and try few things before you dive into one subjectdeeper. Of course it's important to try a few technologies orframeworksat first, but when you feel like you like doing something and it has potential for making you happy in the long run -go for it.

I didn't try many frameworks, I liked React and went straight for it and decided I won't try to learn anything new in this topic unless I'll have enough experience to call myself an expert in this subject. Makingthis decisiondefinitely helped me to get my first job and will most certainly pay off even more in thefuture.

Also when you dive deep in some area ofprogramming, you'll get to know the architecture and patterns of certain technologies, which let you understand on a different deeper level how things are done. Thanks to this, you'll have an easier way ofunderstandingotherstackortechnology.

1. Diving deeper into React

Inthe second part of this series, I shared a few links aboutfree coursesfor learning React. I forgot to mention the mostobviousplace forlearningReact, which isofficial documentationpage.The docsare blazingly fast and amazingly helpful in learning this awesome technology.

Those courses and official documentation are the courses which helped me to learn enough to get a job. I don't know how thejob marketlooks at your country, because it's probably a little bitdifferenteverywhere. Also everyone is a little bit different and learns in a different pace and way.

This is why many of you may want to learn in a more guided and structured environment, which can be given to you bypaidcourses. I made a lot of mistakes while learning how to code too and I wrote some terrible code when I look back into my older Github repositories. I believe that those courses could help me get better understanding on certain ideas faster and better. I tried a few of them and heard about rest of them great opinions.

Those two the most popular places which I recommend here would be:

• Frontend Masters - awesome platform for learning all about Frontend, it has courses from great instructors, including Kyle Simpson - the guy behind theYou don't know JSbook series I recommended in the last article
• Egghead- another awesome platform with some great instructors likeDan Abramov - co-author ofReduxand the first person behind React library

Also if you don't want to pay monthly subscriptions for a service and just buy a course. I'll recommend here a few ones from the one man I recommended here the most - Wes Bos. He's a really great teacher and I am big fan of him.

Those courses are great for you if you want to get your knowledge in a structured way from a professional developer with great experience in this technology.

• ES6* course - this one is for getting your head around EcmaScript 2015 syntax, which had been a big change in a JavaScript world. React is much easier to write in this syntax. It has many great features and this course explains it very well
• React For Beginners* - this one is a great course for all beginners in the technology. If you want to get your knowledge settled and you didn't actually understood a few things about React from the free courses I wrote in the last article, this course will definitely help you get your head around all the concepts.

Those courses are also updated by the author, so you'll always get the updates when there has been any change in particular technology.*I bought a new course from Wes BosFullstack Advanced React & GraphQL**

2. State management

Many times, you'll read that React is not a framework, just alibrary. This statement is a correct one, but if you consider enormously huge and awesome** open source** tooling around React as a part of it, you'll end up with a framework. That's why most people call React a framework.

There's a great amount of open source libraries to learn around react, but one of the most important ones is a State Management Library. The most popular state management library for React isRedux. This is a must-learn implementation ofFlux architectureincreating apps.

Things are changing now in the React world and new emerging state libraries are coming out, but still Redux is the most popular one and it's visible on every job offer when React is included. Other alternative isMobX, but I haven't tried it yet so I cannot tell anything about it.

So if you want to learn Redux, there's another awesomefree coursefrom Wes Bos, where he explains basic concepts ofReduxand shows how to build Instagram-like app with help of Redux.

3. Working with React

There are many other awesome resources on learning React, it would be just impossible to share every one of them, but somebody tried to do this and gathered ton of knowledge in one place.

Awesome React is a GitHub repository with links to many great resources on React. There's no way you'll go through all of them, there's so many !

Reality is you don't have to, ones I mentioned in this series might already be overwhelming enough. I hope you enjoyed it and it will be helpful in a quick start of your programming career!

After you get all familiar with this technologies and you are interested in starting with using React for creating native mobile applications, stick with me. As a React Native Developer, starting from the next article, I'll be writing all about React Native now. I'll try to guide you through every aspect of this technology to help you build your first mobile application.

I wanted this series to be a proper introduction to the exciting journey of app development. This area is even more exciting to work than Web Development for me, that's why I want you to join this journey, I'll try to do my best to explain ins and outs ofReact Nativeand share everything I know about it.

Summary

There are plenty of things to learn when you start, but I hope I helped you to structure some things, now you'll have to do the work. The work may be hard and tedious, but it will definitely pay off in the future.

Programming isn't easy, that's why you have to remember that and think of that everyone was a beginner at some point. The more time you'll spend on learning, the more you'll know and the more confident you'll be in writing code.

For everyday motivation, checkout myInstagramaccount, where I share and try to motivate people to code daily. Don't be afraid to send me a DM, I'll try to answer all your questions when possible.

I wish you good luck on your learning path and if you're interested in React Native, stick with me and come back in the next week!

Those are all affiliate links, when you'll decide to buy a course from this link, I'll get a part of the payment you made on purchasing the course.