DEV Community

Nico Zerpa (he/him)
Nico Zerpa (he/him)

Posted on β€’ Originally published at nicozerpa.com

What you have to learn before React

Learning front-end development is often overwhelming for beginners. Many of them want to learn React, but this question often keeps them from tackle the library.

While you should be comfortable with some basic JS concepts, you don't necessarily need to be a JavaScript expert to learn React (or any other UI library). Actually, you can learn React as you continue learning JavaScript.

You should have a good understanding of the fundamentals of JavaScript:

These syntatic aspects of the language are particularly important:

You should also be aware of these more advance topics:

It's also important to remember that you also need some knowledge of HTML and CSS. Again, you don't have to be an expert, but the more you know, the better.


Become a Better JavaScript Developer! Easy, actionable steps to level up your JavaScript skills, right to your inbox. Click here to subscribe!

Sentry blog image

How I fixed 20 seconds of lag for every user in just 20 minutes.

Our AI agent was running 10-20 seconds slower than it should, impacting both our own developers and our early adopters. See how I used Sentry Profiling to fix it in record time.

Read more

Top comments (4)

Collapse
 
hacker4world profile image
hacker4world β€’

Learning about DOM manipulation is also necessary before learning react, you should build a medium sized web app with pure javascript (no frameworks) so you have the chance to face the problems that react solves, and that way you can appreciate react and learn it easier because you know the purpose of using it

Collapse
 
jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy πŸŽ–οΈ β€’ β€’ Edited

Sadly, this rarely seems to happen

Collapse
 
hacker4world profile image
hacker4world β€’

Yeah people seem to jump into frameworks sooner than they should, and when that happens it makes it harder for them to understand why to use a framework and how it works

Collapse
 
tracygjg profile image
Tracy Gilmore β€’

Hi Nico, Thanks for a great article. I have long maintained that web/frontend developers should first gain a good understanding of the foundational technologies, HTML, CSS and JS, before venturing into mature frameworks like React, Vue and especially Angular.
I have interviewed several bootcamp graduates who have a good understanding of what they were taught on the course but find developing production code a far bigger challenge because of their shallow understanding of web standards.
Besides, as popular are React has been, and probably will be for the near future, there are up and coming contenders for the crown such as Svelte, Solid and Alpine, to name a few.
However, getting (and maintaing) a firm foundation in the web standards will last a developer much longer and help them migrate between frameworks.
I strongly encourage new web developers to trawl MDN and become familiar with the technologies at the heart of our industry.
Regards, Tracy

Billboard image

The Next Generation Developer Platform

Coherence is the first Platform-as-a-Service you can control. Unlike "black-box" platforms that are opinionated about the infra you can deploy, Coherence is powered by CNC, the open-source IaC framework, which offers limitless customization.

Learn more

πŸ‘‹ Kindness is contagious

Please leave a ❀️ or a friendly comment on this post if you found it helpful!

Okay