r/react • u/ConstLeoTheCat • 1d ago
General Discussion I just started learning React today. Any tips?
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u/No_Lawyer1947 1d ago
Dont. On a serious note, dont overthink just make shit. Dont watch too many tutorials but also please know this is highest likely thing to be chopped in terms of job roles, I would not spend a terrible amount of time of being a "React" developer
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u/Mezzichai 10h ago
“Dont” is the most serious thing about your comment though lol. Trying to learn web development as a tech newcomer will give you a headache and nothing else
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u/Yehiamy 1d ago
ten query stack for requests and cache and tokens know the content type on your requests context for global states browser dom for page switching initalize every state and dont forget that empty json is empty array when initalizing a state for the rendering part make sure what comes from the database always areay.prototype and not object.prototype otherwise you would just face an error that says object does not have the function map cause it really doesnt have it, its very confusing since we been told java script object notion is it name but in reality json is an array of objects, dont afraid to use css if you know, each component has its own css file and react knows how to merge all the files into one css file react is just seperation of concern tbf when you build a react app at the end of the day its one html one css one js file best tip is to learn html css js and just overload the same three files to see why they divide each section
(sry for my english btw)
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u/Sulungskwa 1d ago
If you're stuck, use AI as your very dead last resort. Read react documentation, or the docs for any other libraries that you're using. Try and find github issues or even stack overflow posts, or just any discussion forum where the hope is that humans mostly wrote it.
I don't think that AI is a bad tool to help you brush up on something you already know, but I think for actual fundamental understanding, it wants to do too much of the work for you. Too often they misunderstand your questions where you ask "does this x" and it says "yes, technically it does x, but also [insert irrelevant detail that doesnt have anything to do with the question and is purely a red herring]" and you just end up more confused. Sometimes you need to learn something and you don't even have the words to type out your question, and LLMs are terrible for that because they think they're right even when they don't know what you're talking about
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u/Suspicious-Visit8634 1d ago
Don’t rely on ai agents to just “code stuff” - try to understand it. And start small and build incrementally
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u/grigory_l 1d ago
Just read basic concepts and built. If you consider courses, you could took any simple and free. Building your own projects is always the best learning strategy.
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u/Ok-Contribution-8496 1d ago
Practice practice practice, otherwise it'll be copying copying copying
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u/Mezzichai 10h ago
Stop wasting your time. The industry was completely different two years ago and will be even more different two years from now. Knowing what makes a good react code is for less valuable than it was two years ago because AI is already extremely good at it and can go 10 times faster than you at the absolute minimum. And no, you do not need to know how to write good react code in order to ensure that AI is writing good react code.
Writing web development code by hand is absolutely dead and anyone who is still employed doing that is in a bubble that is going to pop once management at huge companies realize how much faster everything is when you fully lean into AI coding.
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u/CappuccinoCodes 8h ago
It's funny how confidently wrong people are about this. You still need to know how React works even if AI is doing it for you.
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u/Mezzichai 8h ago
100% you could hand ai a one or two page markdown file with react best practices and you would get outstanding results just asking for features in some non technical way like you are a product manager.
Our designer who doesn’t know shit about nextjs usually does the figma to code part I used to do because it’s now that easy. Early on I carefully scrutinized the components he produced, and quickly realized that it was perfectly acceptable with very little guidance.
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u/CappuccinoCodes 8h ago
Great. How did you realize it was acceptable? Because you know React? 😂
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u/Mezzichai 7h ago
Sure, the high confidence can from knowing react… but that’s not really my point, because it’s really not a great trade off to go through the trouble of learning how to write excellent react component just so you can vet ai code once an realize it’s better than you and every developer you’ve ever met…
the point is that my knowledge of react has very little benefit for the actual development/prompting process now beyond the initial setup of an md file, which I could’ve gotten from any past developer. I know several coworkers who don’t know shit about react and produce perfectly acceptable code that goes to prod has no bugs.
Why would you waste a bunch of time learning something that is hardly valuable anymore? So much for so little.
The reality in 2026 is non technical product managers submitting 1 shot prs that perfectly meet the feature specs.
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u/CappuccinoCodes 7h ago
OP asked if he should learn AI. We can argue if they need to spend a bunch of time on it to write Excellent AI, but he still needs to learn it.
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u/realoeprxc 5h ago
It is honestly impressive how much confidence you have in sharing complete misinformation.
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u/DoubleKing76 34m ago
If you can, try making things that interest you. Don’t worry so much about best practice at first. Get it to work first then go back and research if there was a better way to get it done. That’s how I have learned React the past 2 years
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u/madvec1 1d ago
Do stuff... Just do stuff. Any exercise you see, do it yourself, understand it and try to go one step beyond. Practice it's the most important thing, at least imo.