Part 1. React foundation

Hello! My name is Azat Mardan, and I’m going to take you on a journey into the wonderful world of React. It will make your front-end development more enjoyable and your code easier to write and maintain, and your users will be delighted at the speed of your web apps. React is a game changer in web development: the React community has pioneered many approaches, terms, and design patterns, and other libraries have followed the path forged by React.

I’ve taught this material more than 20 times in my live-online and in-person workshops to hundreds of software engineers from very different backgrounds and varied levels of seniority. Thus, this material has been battle tested on my students: you’re getting the distilled, most effective version of my React foundation course in a written format. These chapters are critical to get you on familiar terms with React.

Chapters 1–11 are the result of almost two years of work by several people, but they read as a fast sequence of topics that build on each other. The best way to consume these chapters is to start with chapter 1 and proceed in order. Each chapter includes a video message from me; chapters 1–8 have a quiz at the end; and chapters 9–11, which are projects, contain homework for self-guided development.

All in all, this part of the book builds a solid foundation of React concepts, patterns, and features. Can you go to a foreign country and understand the language without studying? No—and that’s why you must learn the React “language” before you attempt to build complex apps. Thus, it’s paramount that you study these basic React concepts—that you learn the React language—which is exactly what you’ll do in the next 11 chapters.

Let’s get started with React—and learn to speak fluent React-ese.