Getting Started in React

One of the reasons for React's huge popularity in building Web Applications is that it's a pretty big paradigm shift from previous techniques of JavaScript in the front-end. The shift in the way we think about how front-end apps should be built is very powerful and makes App creation much easier than in the past. However, getting used to the new paradigm can be a bit of a struggle at first. This talk will assume your JS chops are decent and that you might be coming from another library or framework like jQuery or Angular. I'll teach the basics of React including the parts that often go unexplained.

Pro Tip: One frequent comment from people trying to learn React is how they it's difficult because most React tutorials are very ES6+ heavy and it's hard to tell what is a React thing and what is just the new ES6 and beyond stuff. Well, the React community embraces the modern JavaScript ES6 syntax so it's worth becoming familair with before learning React, so be sure to brush up on some of these things:

- Object Destructuring (including parameter destructuring)
- The new "spread" operator - Arrow Functions (http://bradwestfall.com/articles/dont-get-javascript-es6-arrow-functions)
- The new JS Class Syntax (Btw, JS Classes are purposely not meant to be as full-featured as traditional OOP langs)
- And "JavaScript Promises"