The React Docs Are Wrong (If You Are Trying To Learn React)

Key Takeaways

react finally launched their new documentation and took it out of beta recently which is amazing because the new docs are so much better than the old docs but there's one massive problem with the new documentation and this problem makes it more difficult for every single person to learn react if you haven't worked with react before or you know very little about react this problem in the react docs is going to make your Learning Journey just that much harder [Music] welcome back to web dev simplified my name is Kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you so you can start building your dream project sooner and to get started all I have is the home page of the react documentation open I'll link it down in the description for you but obviously if we're just starting out learning react obviously clicking learn react is going to make the most sense so if we click here it brings us to the quick start documentation now this page is great it explains tons of Concepts and react with really good examples overall I really love this section the documentation but you'll notice there's nothing in here about how to actually install react or start working with react it just jumps you right into like what react is and how all the things work inside of it so I personally think you should start with the installation but either way we can click over on installation to figure out how we should get started with react and you can see that there's a bunch of different ways to get started they recommend just using something inside the browser so you don't have to install anything personally I don't like this route just because you're not really using The Full Experience because obviously if you wanted to play something production you need to know how to install and use react on your own computer so I'm not a huge fan of this route but it's perfectly okay and usable they also recommend this way where you can just download an HTML page with react being imported again not a fan so I'd recommend you know start a new react project this makes the most sense if you want to build an app here we go let's click on this documentation and this is where I have a large problem with the documentation it says right here if you want to build a new app or website using react what you want to do is you're going to want to use one of the react powered Frameworks and they list a few down here for example you have next you have remix you have Gatsby and it mentions a few other different Alternatives as well and this is great I mean if you want to build a large scale production application inside of react it doesn't even have to be that large just any type of production ready application in react using a framework like next.js is going to be an awesome way to do it because it includes things like routing data fetching and so on they mention that in the documentation but if you're just learning react and all you care about is actually learning react there's nothing in here that is going to help you downloading and using next means that now you have to learn next and react to the same time and it become really difficult to separate what's in next and what's in react this is another problem I find where people try to jump from no JavaScript skill right into learning react it's hard to separate what is react specific and what is Javascript specific it's the same thing if you jump straight from JavaScript into next JS it's a really hard to separate what's react and what is next.js and fine there's a lot of overlap between them and for the most part you may be working in xjs that's okay and even if you know you'll only ever use nexjs and never use react on its own it still makes it more difficult to learn react because now you have to learn all of react which is already really confusing and then on top of that you have to learn all of next JS at the exact same time this is why personally if you're just getting started learning react I do not recommend using any framework at all instead I recommend using Veet now they do mention I will give them this they do mention using something like the inside of this section right here on how to use react without a framework and if you expand this it gives you a really long explanation and essentially it does you should really not use this unless your app has really unusual constraints not served well by Frameworks I personally don't think that's a great reason not to use Veet or you know parcel whatever else you want to be using it's essentially saying don't use this except for under very very very specific Niche use cases that most people probably won't run into and it's you know hidden away inside of this drop down to even be able to see it you have to scroll all the way to the bottom just to get a recommendation honestly if you're building a larger scale application use next that makes a lot of sense but if you're learning react the best way to learn react is to use just react and nothing else and I think Veet personally is the best way to do that so I would recommend using Veet with react and then once you have a react app up and running on your computer in V you can follow along with the documentation completely and it's going to be so much easier because if you have a next application you have all that other next related code in there and it can become really difficult to follow along with learning react when you have all that other code in the way I believe so strongly that the best way to learn react is by breaking it down and learning it on its own first before jumping into a framework that I built my entire react course which literally just launched yesterday around the idea of using Veet and learning react on its own before you jump into a framework like next JS as you can see the content in this course covers everything you need to know about react and then it jumps into some more complex topics like security testing clean code best practices that kind of stuff before finally after learning everything there is to know about react jumping into the world of nextges and figure out how to build applications with next JS I personally believe the best way to learn something is to simplify it as much as possible as you can already tell by my channel name so with my react course I tried to simplify everything by learning just react and at the beginning it's just learning small sections of react and slowly adding more and more and more on until you're finally ready to jump into next.js and you can build applications with confidence now if that sounds interesting to you and you want to learn in a simplified way I highly recommend you go down in the description option and click on the link to my react course it launched just yesterday like I mentioned but it's only going to be available for one week from the launch date so it's only got six more days after the day of this video going live and the reason I'm doing that is because I only currently have the first half of the course finished the second half of the course I'm going to be working on over the next coming weeks and months and I'm going to be releasing that as I go to anyone that purchases the course so if you purchase the course now you're not only going to get it at a severely discounted rate but you're also going to be able to access the new content as soon as I finish recording it and uploading it for you so you get Early Access and a discounted rate but again it's only going to be up for a week before I take it down and then in a few months when I finish the entire course it'll be back up permanently so if you're watching this video after the fact I would recommend still clicking on that link checking out the course it may be fully finished and released by then and if not I'll have an email field where you can sign up and I'll let you know as soon as it releases now I know economically it may not make sense for you to buy a course at this time so I want to give you some free alternatives to my course as well the react documentation like I mentioned is actually really really good if you just don't use next and instead use beat if you're first starting out learning react the rest of the documentation is really good and really helpful also I obviously have tons of free videos on YouTube on react and I actually have a completely free react hooks specific course that you can check out it'll be linked in the description as well that course only covers the react hooks it covers all of them but that's the only thing it covers so it requires you to at least have some base level of react before you take that course with that said thank you very much for watching this video and if you are at all interested in my react course I highly recommend you check it out before it closes down so you can get into that early bird discount