Learning React: Functional Web Development with React and Redux 1st Edition

"Learning React" is a book that was written for someone such as myself – a seasoned programmer, but someone who wanted a primer on some of the core concepts of functional programming; who wanted a guide the bigger points of what’s changed from ES5 to ES6; who needed a little convincing as to why MVC frameworks are the end-all-be-all in the web these days.And that's just the first three chapters.After getting through the more theoretical chapters, the meat of the book was a color picker built from start to finish over the course of the book. From passing props to state management to Redux, the examples started with the most basic of concepts and built into more complex data management.The book comes with a link to the GitHub repository with the code samples in it, and it’s super easy to follow along with what has been written having the code samples open and color-coded in my preferred code editor, VS Code.This is a book that got me excited about writing code. It has me walking and talking functional programming, and I was able to go out and almost immediately apply the concepts I learned in it to current projects. It promises to be a book "for developers who want to learn the React library while learning the latest techniques currently emerging in the Javascript language", and it delivers.

Overall, this book was worth my time and money. So, absolutely no regrets with the purchase. For me, the book didn't come across as a "type along as you read" type of book, which I do find useful in reinforcing a subject. Rather, this book is more of the in-depth type where pages contain paragraphs of description and there is a snippet of a code sample to reference. Nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to point it out in my review to set anyone's expectations before purchasing the book. That said, if I may digress for a minute, when I first tried my hand with a React project back in spring 2015, I remember it being architecturally different than the 1.x version of AngularJS and part of learning of React for me at that time was understanding how React was to to fit in the overall work of a single-page app / web app. After that two-week immersion with React, I actually stopped using it due to other priorities and due to my place-of-work's commitment to AngularJS at the time. Now, fast-forward to January 2018 and I am going through this book. The world of JavaScript has changed much since spring 2015. We live with ECMAScript 2015, 2016 and 2017. I decided to purchase this book because I felt that I already knew the quick-and-dirty of setting up a React app (at least I thought I did), but wanted something that would explain what is current in the world of React and get into the subject at a deeper level than what would be found with online tutorials. This book does all of that. Be aware that this book is for those already familiar with ECMAScript 2015 and later. The code examples are written using ECMAScript 2015 syntax, so if you haven't stayed current with JavaScript, you'll want to be sure to read and re-read chapter 2 of the book which does a good job of covering ECMAScript 2015 -- not exhaustively, but enough to prepare you for the rest of the book's code samples. Like other reviewers have pointed out, I did spot typos / grammatical errors in the book, hence the star deduction. This book is the type where you'll want to highlight key topics and be prepared to read chapters several times to really absorb all of the information being presented. If you are not strong with JavaScript, you may find this book overwhelming despite the title being "Learning React." The book assumes, like I mentioned, current knowledge of JavaScript and doesn't attempt to teach JavaScript in addition to teaching React.

I came to this book as an experienced functional programmer and as beginner in JavaScript and React. I left with a working knowledge of the React and Redux frameworks that I could immediately apply into building a web app. I greatly appreciated how the authors showed the object-oriented way of using the framework but also always turned back to showing how to do the same in a functional way.I got exactly what I wanted out of this book and I tried several alongside it to compare. Some intro knowledge about Node.js is recommended to tackle this one, though, so I recommend combining it with "Beginning Node.js" by Basarat Ali Syed. That one helped me bridge the knowledge gap, and launched me into exploring the topic on my own and adding in custom libraries, etc.

This is probably the best book/learning resource I've seen for React so far. It has really helped to distill and clarify the things I've learned about React from various other sources, including training videos (which don't seem to go into enough depth sometimes). The intro on functional and declarative programming offered a good mix of theory as well. I'll definitely keep this on the shelf as a reference book that I'll go back to again and again.