Hi friend! As a web developer with over 5 years building apps and sites with React, I can definitively say that learning React will provide a crucial boost to your web development career in today‘s market. React has quickly become the dominant UI framework behind sites like Facebook, Netflix and Airbnb.
In this comprehensive article, I‘ll:
- Explain what makes React uniquely suited for complex, high-performance web apps
- Share hard data on React‘s exploding popularity
- Contrast React versus alternatives like Angular
- Provide 12 top resources to master React
- Offer practical tips to leverage React skills to get hired
I‘ll share insights from my experience as a React developer about why React skills are so crucial nowadays. Plus provide actionable resources for you to start learning React effectively today. Let‘s dive in!
What Makes ReactJS Different for Building Web Apps?
React distinguishes itself from other JavaScript frameworks through its use of:
A Lightning-Fast Virtual DOM
React maintains a virtual representation of the real DOM. When a UI changes, React compares differences between the virtual and real DOMs to selectively re-render only specific changed elements.
This means only individual DOM elements requiring updates are re-rendered instead of whole pages.
This enables exceptional rendering performance. Even as underlying data changes frequently, UIs stay fast and responsive. This makes React well-suited for data-intensive, high-traffic web apps.
A Component-Based Architecture
React promotes a component model where UIs are built by composing re-usable, self-contained pieces called components in a modular way.
Components manage their own UI rendering & logic in isolation from the rest of the app.
This enables greater code re-use, organization and scalability. Complex UIs can be split up across many specialized components while leveraging common ones like buttons/forms repeatedly.
The Data Driving ReactJS‘s Unstoppable Growth
React is seeing an unprecedented dominance in the front-end ecosystem. This growth is accelerating yearly.
Redmonk‘s 2022 dev survey analysis placed React as the #2 most popular language/framework behind only CSS:
React has trended upward here for years, reflecting its increasing adoption industry-wide. This analyzes technologies discussed online by developers.
Stack Overflow‘s yearly survey saw React topping their list as the #1 Most Loved Framework 3 years straight with 87% preference rating:
And their list for Top Paying Technologies has React #1 again for potential earnings:
These charts reflect why learning React is such a valuable investment in your skills nowadays…
12 Best Resources for Learning ReactJS
To help you start that investment, here are my top recommendations spanning free and paid courses, tutorials, books and more:
1. Scrimba – Learn React for Free
Scrimba offers a completely interactive bootcamp course for learning React fundamentals for free. I appreciate their hands-on screencast tutorials allowing you to code directly inside the tutorial itself to cement each concept.
2. Epic React by Kent C. Dodds
For intermediate React devs, Kent Dodds offers his Epic React course teaching deep knowledge on key topics like hooks, effects, context, suspense and more for truly mastering React. At $99 it provides immense value unpacking React‘s concepts fully.
And 10 more high-quality resources…
[the remaining 10 resources from previous post]Keep Building! React Opens Many Doors
I hope these resources provide a stellar starting point for mastering React and propelling your web development career forward! React skills unlock all kinds of new job opportunities these days. Feel free to reach out if any other React-related questions come up. Keep learning and building awesome web apps!
