React Fundamentals

Learn everything you need to be effective with the fundamental building blocks of React applications.

The path of this workshop takes you from the fundamental API of appending DOM nodes, through React's raw APIs, to how JSX compiles into React's methods.

Once you have a firm grasp of what React is doing with creating elements, you'll learn the other tools you need to build webpages like: styling, forms, and inputs.

But, this isn't just a native web course.

You'll be building a strong foundation in React.

Learn how to:

• build reusable components
• leverage TypeScript with React
• catch errors with Error Boundaries
• render arrays properly with the key prop.

When you’re finished, you’ll be prepared to create and use React components to build excellent experiences for your app's users.

Hello World in JS

You'll start your journey by learning some of the history of how we went from generating HTML on the server and adding JS on top to full-fledged frameworks.

To learn React you'll be following a similar path and begin by learning how to manually append your own DOM nodes.

I call this "going down to level up." You'll find yourself much more efficient with React if you understand the fundamentals of the DOM and JavaScript!

Raw React APIs

Before getting into JSX, you'll learn how to work with React and ReactDOM's raw APIs.

You'll create React elements with React.createElement and learn how compose your elements with calls to this function. Then, you'll render the React elements you create using ReactDOM.

Using JSX

Once you know what React is doing under the hood, you'll be prepared to learn JSX.

This section covers more than just how to write it, you'll also use babel to experiement with how JSX gets compiled to the raw React APIs!

Custom Components

Just like in regular JavaScript, when you want to reuse code, you write functions. If you want to share JSX, you can do that as well.

In this section you'll learn about how in React, we call these functions "components", the special properties of these functions, and how to

TypeScript

TypeScript is not making your life terrible. It's just showing you how terrible your life already is.

- Kent C. Dodds

Getting a solid hold of TypeScript from the get-go will set you up for success. Since React components are just functions, there aren't any special considerations when applying type annotations.

So, you'll be working on two things:

1. Improving your TypeScript skills
2. Learning the React-specific types available

Styling

In this section you'll learn about the two primary ways to style React components:

1. Inline styles with the style prop
2. Regular CSS with the className prop

You'll also learn why React uses a className prop instead of class. 👀

Forms

In React, there actually aren't a ton of things you have to learn to interact with forms beyond what you can do with regular DOM APIs and JavaScript.

Here, you'll learn the form markup, build an onSubmit handler, and then create a form action.

Inputs

There's a ton of different input types and you're going to learn a lot about them here!

You'll learn about the different text inputs, check boxes, radios, hidden inputs, how to make sure everything is properly labeled and accessible, and setting default values and default checked boxes.

Error Boundaries

This is something you want to learn early on. Sometimes things go wrong and we need to handle errors and display useful information to the user.

An ErrorBoundary component doesn't ship with React by default. So, you'll be importing one from react-error-boundry and then learning how to compose it, and then give the option to the user to reset.

Rendering Arrays

In React you can render arrays of elements. One of the tricky parts about it is the key prop.

In this section, you'll learn in detail why React needs the key prop to keep track of elements and the nuances of the value that is used.

Finally, you'll learn a cool trick where the key prop is used as a mechanism for resetting elements in the DOM!