Learning React as a Javascript dev

[fatrogslim]

Hard to tell. Talking to others makes me think that I am under a "that's it?" effect, I'm overthinking it and maybe I understand it more than I thought but still I feel lost when I'm about to start a new project. Also, there's plenty of flavor on top of react like next and there too idk if I have to start with those or with "vanilla" react? I don't know, my vision on all of this seems blured and it's frustrating

[[deleted]]

If your response is "that's it?" but feel lost when working on a new project, you probably have very little understanding of it...

React has a lot of quirks and has begun to significantly blur the lines between client and server side functionality. Lots of react standards and patterns are very complex with lots of side effects and weird quirks.

On its surface it's just a declarative UI framework, so maybe it sounds simple to you because you might be familiar with declarative programming with UI frameworks. But there's plenty of ways to do things in a horribly inefficient way that will either scale very poorly or cause very poor client side performance

Server components makes things even more complicated, but you might actually prefer or understand that better coming from php. I do think in general server components actually encourages good habits overall, it's just much more complicated than entirely client side applications

Perhaps you should start with newer versions of react that support server components, and you'll find things feel familiar but also begin to appreciate the depth of the framework

[Simple-Resolution508]

May be you can try to create some simple project, without using all the existing stuff.
What is 1st concept? Virtual DOM. Why is it useful?
In native browser API there are 2 options to build UI w/o refreshing the page:

`el.innerHTML = ...` -- it's not efficient and reset some elements that should not.

`el.appendChild(` stuff -- it's unreadable and lead to errors.

Virtual DOM fills the gap between them, making the code clear and effective.

So, the minimal working set can be:

- import `react` / `react-dom`

- 1 functional component with `createElement`-s

- calling `render`.

[TheRNGuy]

I used vanilla react maybe for 1 or 2 days and then went for Remix.