My Struggle to Learn React - Brad Frost

I’m going to be honest: I’ve had a hell of a time getting my head around React. More than any other technology I’ve touched over the last 10 years of my career, I just haven’t had it click for me. It’s very frustrating as I really want to learn it, and it’s clear the library has legs.

I found React very difficult to learn the first time I attempted it. So much so that I actually just gave up and moved on to other things. Given that, I find Brad's honest take here extremely relatable (except for the part where Dan Abramov personally helped him through his React struggles.) And from a purely selfish perspective, knowing that a developer (sorry, frontend designer) that I admire had similar struggles with React makes me feel a bit better about myself.

I still don't consider myself a React expert, but three specific things made it click for me:

• I know Brad threw some shade in his post, but Wes Bos' React for Beginners just made a lot of sense to me when other tutorials didn't.
• I enforced what I learned by applying it to a side project that I found legitimately interesting.
• I eventually realized that I was trying to tackle things that were too complex. It wasn't until I focused on nailing some really basic stuff that things started to move fast and click. For me it was representing data in a table before I started trying to filter, sort, or otherwise visualize that data. For Brad it was rendering a full page worth of mock components.

I'm glad I pushed through. Even though I have a lot to learn and a limited amount of time to do so, I really like React.