As a C and then a Ruby on Rails programmer, I never thought I would see the day that my main programming language was Javascript.  But I find React such an enabling technology that I made the effort to learn Javascript properly, and am glad that I did.<p>React itself is allowing me to write web applications faster and with less bugs, primarily because of the unidirectional information flow, but also because of the way it guides you into making everything components, which keeps the borders up between objects and makes testing easy.<p>Even better, I can now create both iOS apps and Android apps at the same time (I knew Objective C but not Java for Android), and at a much faster speed than before - the flex layout model alone has saved me days and weeks of debugging the iOS layouts in storyboards, and now I&#x27;m able to shift code between the app codebase and the web codebase with ease.<p>It is indeed overwhelming when first trying to learn React, especially when trying to learn Javascript at the same time, and this flowchart is so spot-on with the tendency to start using packagers, boilerplate, redux before understanding why they are useful.<p>Follow the flowchart, and you will find happiness!