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Q: Should one get familiar/experienced with React[0][1] first before jumping into React Native dev? Or is this tutorial sufficiently stand-alone without React (web) experience? [0] http://survivejs.com/react/introduction/ [1] https://online.reacttraining.com/p/reactjsfundamentals
[1] http://survivejs.com/react/implementing-kanban/react-and-flu...
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I'd be interested in hearing from people who have learned through this site, but my aim is: One should be able to learn React Native directly through this tutorial, without starting with React for web. The main prerequisite is ES5 JavaScript. The tutorial makes analogies to HTML/CSS/React and other web technologies, but these aren't crucial to understanding the material.
Thanks for putting the effort. Though my knowledge is limited but I don't get this. Why React is different from React Native? Ideally web should be another target just like iOS or Android.
Ideally web is just another taraget :) https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web
That said, while writing a website with react-native-web is potentially interesting for new sites, it can be less worthwhile for an existing site to just embed a little bit (which is one of the huge values of React). It's also still very experimental. But I suspect it will be supported in a huge way soon.
Q: Should one get familiar/experienced with React[0][1] first before jumping into React Native dev? Or is this tutorial sufficiently stand-alone without React (web) experience? [0] http://survivejs.com/react/introduction/ [1] https://online.reacttraining.com/p/reactjsfundamentals
As someone who dove headfirst into RN without JS/React experience (~5 years of iOS), you don't need to know any of that stuff beforehand. I haven't gone through (or really looked in-depth) this tutorial, but I can say that the ES{x} features are pretty easy to grok once you've seen and written them a few times. Most of the syntax specifics are easy to pick up just by reading code. The biggest things I'd focus on for…
I did find the You Don't Know JS[0] book series extreamly helpful as a C++/Python coder who has only done enough JS to get by. But that is the extent of my prep for learning React Native.
Interestingly, the YDKJS author (Kyle Simpson) is very down on the adoption and heavy usage of ES6 class notation and the over-reliance of the syntactic appearance of a OO-language class systems in JS.
His argument is the abstraction will leak the in-its-own-right powerful delegation system of JS prototypes, so why not just learn/use raw objects or his OLOO (objects-linked-to-other-objects) pattern.
I find it hard to mentally map the ES6 class to the equivalent object+prototype structure it is syntax sugar for, so just throw my hands up and for the most part pretend they are Python style open-objects.
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I'd be interested in hearing from people who have learned through this site, but my aim is: One should be able to learn React Native directly through this tutorial, without starting with React for web. The main prerequisite is ES5 JavaScript. The tutorial makes analogies to HTML/CSS/React and other web technologies, but these aren't crucial to understanding the material.
Thanks for putting the effort. Though my knowledge is limited but I don't get this. Why React is different from React Native? Ideally web should be another target just like iOS or Android.
You're correct that there's no theoretical reason that RN apps can't run on the web; as dabbott mentions, react-native-web is one third-party attempt at this. We'd like to support this officially one day but don't currently have a high-quality solution we can recommend.
Can anyone give pros/cons of RN vs Native in a nutshell? I'm already familiar with native coding, but not sure how much better RN is than say PhoneGap.
The biggest pain point so far is adding analytics but otherwise, everything is pretty smooth sailing.
Also I come from a web developer background, so structuring layout isn't too unfamiliar. AMA if you have any qns. I'm looking to pour all these experiences into a blog post before my next distraction comes and terrorizes my short-term memories
Can anyone give pros/cons of RN vs Native in a nutshell? I'm already familiar with native coding, but not sure how much better RN is than say PhoneGap.
The React way of managing views makes a lot of sense - change a variable and the whole UI updates accordingly. Also, rather than going through the typical debug, modify code, recompile cycle, there is a Hot Reload mode in RN where your code updates are immediately applied when you save. Laying the UI out with RN's CSS-style syntax is a lot easier than doing it by hand or mucking with Interface Builder / Android XML files. There is a lot that RN wraps around that gives easier management of than the native approach to, e.g. a BackButton component vs. dealing with a stack of Android fragments.
I haven't done any PhoneGap programming, the lack of native UI always scared me off. Without that, I never felt like I could hit a level of polish that was acceptable. The nice thing with RN is you can build you own native components and access native functionality as needed. It's not super well documented, but powerful when you need it.
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I've built one. It worked nicely once loaded but I found it took too long to initialize when switching between keyboards so I ended up going purely native. For your use case this may not be an issue however.
any chance you open-sourced it ?
Hope it saves you some time!