Murach's React

If you have basic HTML/CSS/JavaScript skills and want to learn React, this book is for you. It has been carefully crafted and streamlined so it won’t waste your time by presenting outdated or irrelevant skills. Instead, it will help you focus on the most current and important skills for developing React apps.

Section 1: Get started fast

This book begins with a seven-chapter crash course that teaches the basics of React development. These chapters show how to:

• Create your first working React app using the Vite built tool
• Master the advanced JavaScript that's used in most React apps including destructuring and functional programming
• Create reusable components that make building complex UIs manageable
• Pass data through your app so every component gets exactly what it needs
• Build interactive UIs that respond to user actions immediately
• Connect to web APIs to get live data for your components

Section 2: More skills as you need them

After the first seven chapters, the modular design of this book lets you jump to any other chapter to learn new skills as you need them. These skills include how to:

• Create single-page apps (SPAs) that deliver the smooth, instantaneous navigation experience that users expect
• Style professional-looking apps with CSS modules or the Tailwind CSS library
• Optimize performance by using memoization to eliminate unnecessary re-renders
• Catch bugs before they reach production by using TypeScript to provide static typing
• Test your components like a pro with Jest and the React Testing Library
• Build production-ready, SEO-friendly apps that use Next.js to provide server-side rendering

Like all our books, this book is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to learn new skills faster and retain them better. To do that, it presents the modern React skills you’re likely to need on the job without wasting your time by presenting outdated information that you aren’t likely to need. In addition, the exercises at the end of each chapter provide a way for you to gain valuable hands-on experience without extra busywork.

All of the software recommended for this book can be downloaded from the internet for free.

VS Code

This book shows how to use VS Code to develop React apps because it’s an excellent IDE that you can use to write the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that’s needed by React apps. In addition, VS Code provides an integrated terminal that provides access to the command line.

Node.js

This book shows how to use Node.js to install most of the packages required for React development. In addition, it shows how to use Node.js to run a web API that provides the data for a React app.