Agreed - I did say JSX aside :-) JSX is coupled so tightly with React, and such a large part of React&#x27;s offering, that learning React without JSX is probably actually going to slow down learning for the opposite reasons.<p>In general, ES6 is a prerequisite for developing <i>anything</i> in JS for any developer&#x2F;project with a forward-looking mentality in 2016 - but I do have to disagree that knowing ES6 is essential for learning React. They&#x27;re actually completely orthogonal at this point - it allows for cleaner code but doesn&#x27;t buy you anything at all in terms of learning the React concepts.<p>As for getting started on the Babel toolchain - again it&#x27;s orthogonal to learning React. The in-browser JSX transpiler is available. You can start learning react in a single page of html with script tags, just pulling all the libraries off cdns. There&#x27;s just no need to have a tool chain at all, it is not essential.<p>I think it comes down to the definition of beginner. If you&#x27;re taking a very experienced JS developer and starting them on a real world React project, by all means go in at the deep end - they&#x27;ll likely know most of the toolchain anyway and they&#x27;ll need it. If you&#x27;re talking about just giving someone an intro to React and its concepts, you have to separate the core from the ecosystem.<p>My point was that we should recognise the difference, this is a common problem where experienced users tell beginners to &#x27;just use&#x27; things that take months to become accustomed to in a few throwaway sentences, because to them it is just that easy. To a real beginner it represents a massive ramp, and that&#x27;s not what you want when just trying to get an intro to a specific library.