React koans

A big part of my Junior Rails Developer course is learning front-end technologies. To be precise I am going to learn Javascript and React, which is a framework of choice for Arkency team.

My first task was to finish react-koans made by Arkency to at least get some first look into it. It took me about two evenings to finish it and since I have never learned any JS framework before. Except for a little bit of Meteor around 1.5 years ago, but after such a long break I think it doesn’t count. Plus my Javascript is at very basic level. It took me some time to provide a proper solution to some of the exercises.

Overall react-koans served it purpose and I at least could make some assumptions how it works at least how I think it does some things. As for the koans itself. They were interesting and not overly complicated. But I do believe some of the descriptions could be clearer. And errors displayed by tests could be in some places more helpful at least for a beginner like me. But the whole experience with it was very positive and I do recommend you to check it out if you want to learn a little bit of React.

As for React and my first thoughts about it. First of all, everything I will write here is my opinion after just React koans and nothing else, to be honest, and probably is not accurate or simply completely wrong. But well those are my first feelings about it.

What I think is cool in React at least after finishing koans is that each component on a site is treated as a seperate object and all of it functions and states are described inside closed section.

The second thing I noticed and liked is that it seems to do just one thing and that its. It doesn’t try to be complete front-end frameworks from what I see and heard like ember or angular.

I am quite excited that in next weeks it will be a strong part of my course and I hope to share with you some cool things I will do with it. Also, I am going to read some books about Javascript soon. Two from Arkency and three others and I am going to let you know what I think about them in the future. You can check out my finished react-koans here.

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