How to become a React developer?

Hey readers!👋 There are so many blogs, tutorials, and materials out there on the internet about how to become a react developer. Sometimes it can be so overwhelming to learn and what not to learn.

In this blog, I am going to give you the precise guide you need to get started in your career as React Developer and be familiar with its ecosystem.

Before Learning React

React just like any other framework requires you to have some fundamentals under your build before you get started. This like most includes:

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript Basics

These are the building blocks of most things on the web and this is why it’s so often emphasized to know these. We will dive into the details of which concept you should be familiar with to take the next one.

HTML

In terms of HTML, just know the tags and how to implement it.

• Basic of HTML
• Semantic HTML
• Dividing the page into sections and structuring the DOM properly

CSS

In terms of CSS, just knowing the basics of CSS will be useful so that you can style your page. This includes things like understandings the below concepts properly.

• Basics of CSS and Layout
• Grid and Flexbox
• Responsive Web Design and Media Queries.

Javascript

For javascript, a good understanding of how the syntax works are useful, and knowledge of DOM manipulation work

• Syntax and basic operations
• DOM Manipulation
• Closure, Events, Prototyping
• ECMA Script 6+, learn new features

General Development Skills

A general understanding of web development is also useful and this is stuff like:

• Git – Version Control
• HTTP/HTTPS protocol
• Learn to search for solutions
• Terminal Usage
• Design Patterns

Understanding of version control works through git, so being to use GitHub and it’s all features like git fetch and merges and making sure that you are properly committing is quite an important thing to be able to do because most react applications aren’t built overnight.

There are a lot of people often working at the same time on one application so version control is very useful. Getting better at understanding how HTTP and HTTPS work is also a good thing to be able to do.

These are things that if we have a good understanding then we can start implementing straight away also being able to search for problems and solutions is thing that I cannot understate how important it is, simply because it makes it easy for you to search and find things quickly.

React Ecosystem

Now the first thing you are going to do when you jump into react has a good understanding of build tools there are things like package managers and task runners

Package Managers

• npm
• Yarn
• pnpm

The package manager plays an important role because this is where we install modules for we react, there are three top package managers. Having a bit of understanding of webpack is also useful

React Fundamentals

• Components
• JSX Expressions
• props
• Working with state
• Routing Overview

Understanding the fundamentals of react would eventually help you to gain more experience in react and its features. JSX expressions gave you a better understanding and the difference between a normal js file and react JSX file.

Working with the state would probably teach you how to interact with all the states available in the react library like useState, useEffect, useRef, and many more. It also teaches you the Context API i.e useContext which is used to manage the state of the website more accurately.

Tailwind CSS

• Tailwind Utilities
• Layouts in tailwind
• Dynamic properties and values
• Tailwind configuration

Tailwind is the CSS framework that helps you to write CSS inside the HTML file. It makes CSS writing easy and provides many inbuilt layouts that you can use. While learning tailwind one thing that makes it more useful is documentation it is easy to grasp and fit in react ecosystem.

React Advance

• Advance React Hooks
• API Clients
• Destructuring Props
• Lazy loading
• Advance react patterns

Learning the advanced concept of react will help you get better at understanding to react and it’s core components. Usually, people don’t learn the advanced react concept properly and this result in a lack of knowledge about the particular environment.

API clients will allow us to connect our application to say maybe an API, if you are using rest then you can use something like Axios or fetch which is already native as part of react but has a good understanding of how they work make it easier to use your applications

It will teach you broad concepts like compound components, state machines, flexible components, and many more such concepts.

Testing

There are a few different testing options like

• Jest
• Enzyme
• Sinon
• Karma

E2E testing also there with provides a lot of tests like:

• Selenium
• Cypress
• puppeteer
• Cucmber.js
• NightWatch.js

Testing is something you don’t essentially have to do but it’s worth checking out if you want your application just to be properly tested before you push it out to production.

Where to learn?

Getting the roadmap or guide is one thing, but finding a good resource and proper up-to-date materials is not easy to find. Don’t worry your bro got your back introducing the Codedamn Frontend Developer Path.

In this comprehensive interactive learning platform, codedamn offers you the best way to learn with hands-on labs, practical projects, and community support. All these things are done right from your browser.

The module is designed in such a way that will help you to learn actual real-time use cases of react and not just theory. It covers all the concepts and topics mentioned above plus it also provides many more topics which will help to be a better react developer.

Conclusion

This concludes most of the topic and roadmap here for react there is a few things to go through but as you use react on a daily basis over a few years, you will be able to go through each one of these cover topics and learn them quite well.

The most important topic is learning HTML and CSS super important in javascript because most of the time you’re simply using them along with react and other frameworks or utilities.

I personally learned to react too, one thing I can say for sure is learning to react would be the best thing you would choose. Anyway, I hope you like this blog and had your doubts clear by now about React and its ecosystem. Have great learning!😊