My struggle to learn React
Honestly I don&#x27;t know how I learned React. It&#x27;s not fun at all. Oh sure, the basics of React is not too hard. If you ignore all the outdated examples and code (using var, no JSX, overusing component lifecycle, not using functional components). But then learning Redux, React Router, React JSS, Reselect, Redux Thunk, Webpack, etc., is just terrible. Sure, there are tutorials for each individual library, or maybe even two or three of the libraries at once. But combining all of them and making sure that it&#x27;s not a total mess of code is like trying to play QWOP with your code. Now that I have everything compartmentalized and understood, it&#x27;s pretty easy. But getting there is a long long journey.<p>I&#x27;ve played around with an idea for a tutorial on modern web development that starts with just basic JS DOM fiddling, then introduces various features and techniques as they&#x27;re needed. So you&#x27;d start with just using old school document selectors. But then, as all the getElementByClassName calls become annoying, maybe you&#x27;d introduce transpilation, so that you can querySelector with a map&#x2F;filter. Then, as the updating starts to get hairy, you could introduce a library like React. As state becomes an issue, Redux. But the point would be to start with the basics and build up an understanding of <i>why</i> we need these libraries. And what problems they solve and what problems they don&#x27;t solve. But of course, the moment anybody writes this tutorial, half of it will become outdated. Ah well.