Heard a guy at a coffee shop say "just learn React" to a beginner and it bugged me

I was waiting in line at a coffee shop in Portland last Saturday and I overheard this older developer telling a younger guy, "just learn React, that's all you need." It got me thinking because I've been coding for about 6 months now and I started with basic JavaScript first. That guy skipped over HTML, CSS, and core JS concepts like loops and functions. I found out the hard way that without those basics, React just looks like magic and you don't understand why things break. It took me 3 tries to get a simple to-do list working in React because I didn't get how state or props work yet. I think people rush to frameworks way too fast when they should spend time on the fundamentals. Has anyone else run into this pressure to learn a framework before the basics?

2 comments

2 Comments

max4726d ago

Read this article on dev.to the other day that said the same thing basically. The guy who wrote it compared learning React without JS basics to trying to ride a bike with no wheels. Made total sense to me. I spent like a month just doing vanilla JS projects before even looking at React and I'm so glad I did. When I finally started React, all the concepts like state and props clicked way faster because I already understood how functions and objects worked in plain JS. Feels like that coffee shop guy was just trying to sound smart instead of actually helping someone learn the right way.

matthewgonzalez1d ago

Man that bike with no wheels analogy hits hard... I had almost the exact same experience. Spent two weeks trying to make a simple counter app in React and couldn't figure out why the number wouldn't update on screen. Turns out I didn't even understand how a basic function return worked in plain JS yet. I felt so stupid when I went back and learned about closures and the event loop first. Everything in React just builds on those core JS ideas, like the render cycle makes zero sense without knowing how the call stack works. That coffee shop guy probably learned React years ago when he already had ten years of JS experience, so he forgot what it's like to start from zero. People who say "just learn React" are basically telling someone to skip learning how to walk and go straight to running a marathon...