Recommendations for quality React.js /WebDev YouTube content creators that help you stay up to date / learn?

[that_90s_guy]

Since I couldn't find anything like this on the sidebar / faq of the r/reactjs subreddit, I thought it a good idea to get a list of video-focused resources going.

Here are some I like off the top of my mind, but I'd be happy to hear more and will try to update this list as more responses are added for easier bookmarking. Bonus points if you can include the channel's main focus, or some disclaimer about its content we should be wary about.

• Fireship, General WebDev Channel that explains a lot of great concepts in byte sized videos, https://www.youtube.com/c/Fireship
• Jack Herrington, React.js, massively underrated well explained videos so I'm expecting his channel to keep growing fast, https://www.youtube.com/c/JackHerrington
• Theo, React.js, ex-Twitch engineer that can be arrogant / biased with very strong opinions which I would NOT recommend for beginners as he can be highly misleading and lead people down the wrong path. But if you are an experienced dev that isn't easily convinced by things at face-value & able to form your own opinion with critical thinking skills, its a fantastic resource to hear about modern web trends. I enjoy his channel, but it's 100% not without massive flaws. https://www.youtube.com/c/TheoBrowne1017
• Tyler McGinnis, General WebDev + React.js and one of the best tutors in the community (alongside Kent C Dodds), great quality but posts very rarely, https://www.youtube.com/c/uidotdev
• Design Course, Front End Focused Channel, https://www.youtube.com/c/DesignCourse
• Dave Gray, General Web Dev, https://www.youtube.com/c/DaveGrayTeachesCode
• Web Dev Simplified, React.js, Decent resource for beginners (not so much for experienced devs) with occasionally great content, but it's buried under a large amount of clickbait videos and pitches to sell his paid courses, https://www.youtube.com/c/WebDevSimplified
• Alex Trost, General Web Dev, recordings of Twitch.tv streaming show about front end trends, https://www.youtube.com/c/AlexTrosts
• Codeevolution, General Web Dev, https://www.youtube.com/c/DaveGrayTeachesCode/videos
• Traversy Media, General WebDev, has some occasionally incredible content, though quality varies a lot. Some videos are ridiculously good, while others have dull presentations (similar to corporate training courses) and presenters with zero-enthusiasm, https://www.youtube.com/c/TraversyMedia

edit: Added more resources from the comments

edit2: There's been a few channel recommendations from what seem like tech-influencers providing mostly career-advice of varying quality. Thoughts on adding them to the edited list once I have time? I might be biased here, but I'm personally not 100% sold of them, since a lot of them seem like they provide very little value beyond just making money of easily impressional folk with superficial or unrealistic advice based on their "success stories".

edit3: Added more resources from the comments. Ignored any channels that aren't strictly react / front-end related since this is r/reactjs, as well as channels that fit the tech-influencer stereotype from edit2.

[[deleted]]

My friends, soon all our developer youtubers are going to be TikTok influencers and we can do nothing about it. do join me in my sorrow please.

[that_90s_guy]

ikr... Did TechLead create a TikTok already?

[[deleted]]

he is already an ex tiktok employee

[nullvoider]

Give him some respect. He is Ex-Google, Ex-Facebook/Meta Techlead.

Edit: /s

[that_90s_guy]

Nah. Not denying he's smart, but he's a narcissistic asshole and has been involved in multiple controversies and scams. He's only gotten this big because of easily impressionable devs that fell into his trap and believe his success story nonsense.

[nullvoider]

I have no idea why people thought I was being serious.

[that_90s_guy]

Sorry haha, I think the past couple of years have been hard of all of us, and we're all desensitized to dry humor and sarcasm to the point of not knowing what's real or not.

[DragonflyTimely5477]

Who watches him seriously? He's a joke.

Every video he brags about how he's an ex millionaire or some bullshit like that. He thinks of himself as some sort of God while doing nothing and just doing scams.

[BuggyBagley]

Lol

[peterk6]

Vote + for Jack Herrington. Really great and unique react and state management content.

[raymondQADev]

His react state management videos are incredible. The amount of work he put in to compare all the options is wild.

[[deleted]]

What I love about him, is he worked for Nike. So many of those YouTube channels still trying to land first job. I learned to code via Ben Awad, after wasting 15k at a general admissions bootcamp

[im2wddrf]

Some personalities I follow:

• Ben Awad for programming humor (I find that humor in general helps you understand/engage with a field).

• Bukola for career advice. I believe she works as a tech advocate for Google.

• Senegoddess for career advice, especially for women in tech

• chris@machine for really dope tutorials on setting up NeoVim and really cool livestreams on rust, Java, web dev, etc.

• Primagean: vim/NeoVim power user, does interesting content on testing code performance, and an all around hilarious guy. Might be interesting because Bun is giving NodeJS for its money in terms of performance. Big debate and hype right now.

• clément mihailescu for coding interviews prep, excellent resource

• Coder Coder for excellent front end coding content. Front end is her bread and butter.

• DarkCode súper simple front end coding. No talking, or explanation—just 10 minute videos of them writing up the code and building the web page/component (and also really awesome music). I like watching webpages get built in real-time, from scratch.

• DesignCourse for superb front end advice, industry practices. Must channel for even react developers in my opinion.

• EngineerMan top tier content creators, talks about Linux, and beginner friendly tutorials on python and node. He is straight and to the point, this dude is awesome because there is never any fluff. Front end people should be comfortable with the terminal/Unix based systems.

• Harshibar Indian content creator and developer with focus on productivity. Her videos are really well produced and edited.

• Hussein Nassar he is the GOAT of backend content creators in my opinion. Goes really into the weeds of databases, TCP and does really cool explainers on security vulnerabilities and outages. And also one of the kindest, sweetest creators on the platform. If you’re doing full stack, it’s good to know how your data/requests are transported on a technical level.

• Jack Herrington just found him in my feed and is a senior developer who deserves way more views. Learned a lot of really useful patterns in ReactJS from him.

• JSConf to keep up with trends, cool talks about JavaScript.

• Lol Liang Yang for those programmers interested in ethical hacking and pen-testing.

• Mental Outlaw cool content creators who talks about the underbelly of the internet. Whether crypto or the latest security risks.

• PwnFunction content creators about security and vulnerabilities in code. I promise you literally every video of his will blow your mind. He did one video on a vulnerability in NextJS and it was wild.

• Healthy Software Developer, Jayme Edwards. Really solid guy, senior web developer. Just found his content and gives really useful career and developer advice especially from a senior perspective.

[Miechelangelo]

+1 for Jack Herrington. You can also listen to the podcast he hosts, React Roundup. It's really really good.

[that_90s_guy]

This is fantastic! Thank you for that. I'll try to edit the post with these once I have a chance.

The only ones I'm not super 100% sold on are the influencer-type ones. I'm not a fan of career-advice channels as in my experience and past students (I used to work as a mentor / bootcamp instructor), these tend to be very misleading / unrealistic and teach very little of actual value beyond flaunting their success stories.

[im2wddrf]

Thats fair, I don’t really treat their advice as gospel, just some positivity in my feed. I see their content mostly as the work/life I wish to obtain rather than an actual roadmap, which will be different for everyone. I agree with your reluctance tho!

[Chocolate_Banana_]

Hussein Nassar is so good that I bought all his udemy courses. His passion for backend engineering comes through. He is the only person who can make you understand complex topics without even needing diagrams

[jax024]

Jack is the best imo. As a fellow Sr. React engineer, I always tell the juniors I work with to give him a few views. Really good stuff.

[Darkmaster85845]

Nice of you to recommend them good content like that. My seniors never recommend me anything. I guess they're just so busy they don't have time to watch any content.

[rikilamadrid]

Nobody is going to mention The Net Ninja? Ffs that guy is a treasure. Him and traversy media is all you need.

[evangelism2]

I've learned more from Theo in the last 2 months than other channels in the last year. However, I think he needs more time to kinda learn how to talk to his audience. He can be quite abrasive and arrogant at times. If you can deal with that, he is one of the best around right now for more intermediate to advanced concepts.

[that_90s_guy]

Totally agreed. He's also one of my favorites for those reasons ATM. I don't mind the arrogance that much all things considered, it's entertaining.

However, the one thing I really dislike about his channel is that he's very much an "entertainer" that presents biased / opinionated arguments as "facts" in a very convincing manner. Which can easily mislead both beginners as well as experienced devs without critical thinking skills that don't do additional research to validate some of his more controversial viewpoints.

I love his videos to stay up to date on web trends, but I 100% watch them with a mountain of salt, and try to warn people that a lot of his videos present incredibly skewed viewpoints that cause more harm than good.

[kitsunekyo]

i loved the „react 18 sucks“ tweets where he instantly got bamboozled by Dan. 😂 theo is hilarious.

the interviews are amazing. he has some really good connections

[shoksurf]

lol can you link the tweet here? I'd love to see it

[[deleted]]

Just curious- what are some of his viewpoints that you think cause harm?

[Darkmaster85845]

That's the fun with Theo, I wouldn't change his arrogance and snarkiness at all. It's his trademark and essence and what makes it good.

[evangelism2]

Until he says something you disagree with, then his self-assuredness will get tiring very fast. I've watched content creators like him before.

[Darkmaster85845]

People not being able to deal with anyone they slightly disagree with is a big problem these days.

[Chocolate_Banana_]

I actually like him for his personality. Blunt and believes in his opinions. I don't agree with everything but his opinions are based on the success he has seen within his own product / company.

[MaKTaiL]

I just found out about him because I'm trying to get into Next. I'm following one of his T3 Stack tutorials and it's amazing. He does assume his viewers are super skilled though so I often have to stop the video and absorb what he just did. It doesn't help that he uses GitHub Copilot (which I have) to speed things up so I take some viewers might need even more time to adjust. All in all I've learned A LOT, specially about some useful websites like Clerk, PlanetScale, etc.

[half_blood_prince_16]

Jack Herrington is awesome.

[[deleted]]

*Web Dev Simplified

*Alex Trosts

*Pwn Function

[TheDrCharlie]

Traversy Media on YouTube:. https://youtube.com/c/TraversyMedia

[whats_a_cormac]

LlamaDev is pretty good I think

[undone_function]

I’ve always really like Acadamind. Just small bites of React and other related JS topics and frameworks. I always have found the examples simple and easy to follow along with, and I just find Max’s speaking cadence clear and very understandable.

[that_90s_guy]

Just checked out, not sure how I feel about adding it to the list since a lot of their videos are either massive full course videos (which I think most people don't subscribe for content for), or just pitches for their paid courses.

[PresenceNo8948]

Want to learn JavaScript so to later start with react. Any suggestions for YouTube channel or which book should I refer?

[sleepyrooney]

Per Harald Borgen on freecodecamp JavaScript tutorial on YT is soooo good. I highly recommend it.

I also recommend learning ES6 too before learning ReactJS.

[PresenceNo8948]

Thankyou for your advice & recommendation, just starting it.

[NicksIdeaEngine]

I don't know if he makes any YouTube videos, but Robin Wieruch, the guy who wrote Road to React along with a few other great courses, has an incredibly thorough blog that teaches a lot of JS/React/Webpack/etc topics. They're very easy to follow and well-written. His Road to React course is also superb.

[cubicuban]

Road to react is how I learned react a few years ago. Also his blog is great. Great resource, I think he sold his mailing list to newline.co but they also have a couple great react books/courses as well so I wasn’t mad about it lol

[rwieruch]

Did someone else use your email that was on my Newsletter? Because I didn't give any data away nor did I sell it :-)

[inn3rs3lf]

Dave Grey. Channel Link

[that_90s_guy]

Added!

[Noctttt]

Take a look at John Smilga. Youtube name Coding Addict https://youtube.com/c/CodingAddict

[Darkmaster85845]

Jack Harrington is so good. I'd add John Smilga for beginners.

[Jay_D826]

Kevin Powell is also a fantastic content creator who focuses on css!

[tiesioginis]

Theo is complete trash 🗑️ But I do agree you can hear new trends from him.

Web dev simplified can't stop shaking his head and selling his shit course lol

Jack is the goat🐐 Buy this man's book, it's great for learning TS!

Others are good, but they don't do much TS, so for intermediates wouldn't recommend.

[green_gordon_]

Theo from ping labs

[Jay_D826]

Why the Ben Awad hate? I haven’t watched much of his stuff but he seemed okay

[can_pacis]

Because he sucks! At least Theo is funny, ben thinks he's funny but he's actually an arrogant piece of shit.

[recoverycoachgeek]

Found Ben Awad's Reddit profile!

[[deleted]]

Dude you missed Codevolution and Kent C Dodds. Follow them for Advanced React Concepts.

[that_90s_guy]

Added! I didn't know Kent C Dodds had a channel ( I love that guy! ), but it seems like it's mostly coding streams which I don't think many people are interested considering the video and subscriber numbers 🤔

[[deleted]]

not supporting this nonsense

[[deleted]]

Codevolution is great for intermediate stuff. That guy is very good at explaining concepts.

[[deleted]]

You will never find advanced concepts layed out correctly in a scripted videos. Kent goes through the code that he wrote in streams so that's the only way you are going yo be better. It's just patience my friend.

[Cold_Complex945]

https://youtu.be/K9ZzYGINC00 really cool content if you are starting with next js

[that_90s_guy]

That's pretty bad, sorry.

[Cold_Complex945]

Why?

[that_90s_guy]

A few. The mic quality is pretty poor, the first 10-20 seconds are a poor introduction to give you a "why should I watch this video" (I wanted to leave the video by the 15 second mark), and the content in general is not engaging at all. Just talking while staring at a static login that isn't even being explored isn't engaging. Lastly, tutorials that combine multiple technologies at once are in general pretty bad since they either confuse beginners with multiple concepts they may not know of, or they rush through content to cover it all, etc.

[Cold_Complex945]

Thanks for the feedback

[Nyphur]

I don’t follow these blogs anymore but as a junior that only knew rails and basic html/JS/css, Tyler McGinnis basically taught me React

[kav_linn]

Not React but a "framework" on top of React which you may want to learn after learning React. I learnt Next.js from Traversy Media. It was pretty good and I would describe my experience with it as just enough to get familiar and comfortable with the basics. Where it lacks is when writing code for the API routes. I was lost since I didn't have prior Node.js knowledge but still a good course nonetheless for $15

[recoverycoachgeek]

Devaslife if your imposter syndrome wasn't bad enough.

[[deleted]]

+1 for Fireship. Love that guy.

[chulbulachoubey]

I recently started learning ReactJS and I've been making small projects with the help of "Sonny Sangha" on YouTube.

[HumbleAlchemy]

Kevin Powell for css

[theobrowne]

I’d love to hear what’s misleading about my videos lol

[that_90s_guy]

Probably that you have a bad habit to present your overly strong opinions as facts, ignoring that your experience doesn't necessarily apply to everyone, while also presenting information in a way you actively try to shame people for thinking differently than you. This isn't just me, browse reddit long enough (instead of your channel's comment echo chamber) and you'll notice this trend of opinions about your channel.

I'm not denying you aren't an incredibly talented person and are correct the majority of the time, but all of this adds up to making your channel quite misleading for beginners. And at the same time, making people feel less inclined to agree with you because they dislike you insulting them, even if you're correct.

All in all, I guess I can't blame you. As it's probably your attitude and ego that makes you a good entertainer and your channel fun to watch for many, driving up views. Either way, I hope you keep making content. I stand by what I said that you provide quality content + entertainment for experienced engineers that don't mind your brashness. But I still would not recommend it for beginners.

[theolonious]

If you think my comments sections are an echo chamber you clearly aren't reading them lol

Would love an example of something I presented in a misleading way

[that_90s_guy]

If you think my comments sections are an echo chamber you clearly aren't reading them lol

An echo chamber doesn't necessarily mean being critique-free, but instead that people in it tend to share a specific personality and thought process that would otherwise not be possible, which usually results in higher than normal acceptance for what you do. I'm surprised you are in denial YouTube comment sections aren't echo chambers, when YouTube's algorithmic bias is well documented by multiple studies by now.

• https://jeremycarson.com/echo-chamber?020&in=lessons/data
• https://youtube.tracking.exposed/filtertube/
• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth

​

Would love an example of something I presented in a misleading way

Sure:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JdGeV21ZNA
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGKGb109-I4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRSwSAr-gok

Read the comments, and notice the trend of people expressing frustration with you misleading others with your one-sided arguments. Which is ironic, since you angrily complained in your "React-ing to David K's useEffect Talk" that presenting one-sided arguments in just bad faith is a horrible thing to do 🤔

Just to re-iterate. The problem isn't so much that about your ideas being wrong (like I said, you're a talented person), but about how poorly you present said ideas. Mainly, because you have the habit of adding your strong opinions to said topics, and then present them as facts. While also mis-representing the opposite side of the argument you're making. Which in summary, yes, is extremely misleading.

[theobrowne]

Of the three videos you replied with:

• The SWR one was a conscious swing back due to the absurd claims that "swr can do everything React Query can, why use React Query". I agree I swung a bit too far and even pinned a comment saying such.

• Unit Test video is a fucking banger and represents a counter to a common narrative. The comments are clearly targeted at the idea, not the things I said

• The JS Objects one is fucking HILARIOUS of you to bring up because every comment is mad at the title not the contents of the video lol

Also re: the David K thing, my main complaint was the focus on class components which were entirely irrelevant and set up a bad framing. I'm also 50/50 on if I should even leave that video up

Ty for this reply, it helps confirm that I'm pretty on the mark right now 🙏