Show HN: Fullstack React Native – A Project-Based Guide to Learning React Native

Talk about validating demand. Would love to see them do an indiehacker interview after the fact...

I recently started to play around with React Native since I wanted to make a specific app. I first learned React and Redux for the web and then applied that knowledge to React Native.

You don't have to learn Redux though but if you want to build anything beyond trivial you will have to do state management so you might as well pick the most popular way of doing that.

I've been at it for 7 or so weeks now (full-time) and I have a running iOS/Android app (this time also includes building an API the app talks to and an admin area for admins to login to for house keeping purposes). I still need to finish up "loads" of details but I'm over the major learning curve (I think).

If this book would have been any help to me? Looking through the chapter topics, I think not. To me, the real useful information would be more about the differences and similarities in how to implement good UI/UX for both iOS and Android, generating the required certificates, publishing to the app stores etc.

I have been developing software for 20+ years, if that makes a difference.

We're writing it so that new newcomers to React can still pick up the fundamentals of the API while learning React Native at the same time. However, the content is geared towards developers who have at least a basic understanding of JavaScript, so you may need to pick up some of the core concepts of the language first before purchasing a book like this.

With that being said, our first chapter is free and goes through building a stand-alone app from start to finish. You can definitely give that a shot first if you're still unsure :)

Stephen Grider's courses on Udemy were good enough to get me going with my own app in just a week or so of video+coding. Went through all of his first and ~1/2 of his second course on React Native.

My only complaint is that he doesn't do a great job explaining a lot of the underlying principles of React Native that well. Strange issues with View, intricate details of the Flex model, React-Native seems to have lots of edge cases around almost everything. Heck it took me the better part of three hours to get the keyboard so it wouldn't cover my input boxes[1]. But overall it does a good job getting started.

Then again this is the same framework that has multiple Medium articles published about how to get an image to expand to the full screen width, with rather conflicting advice being given at times. If anything, React-Native is the best jobs creation program I have seen in a while, it has generated a lot of blog posts of people explaining how to do what should be basic things! :)

All that said, if this book contains explanations of why things happen, I'd pick it up in a heartbeat. Unfortunately I can't tell that w/o giving my email. :/

[1]Facebook's component for this, KeyboardAvoidingView, is 90% undocumented. After a number of other issues, my final one was forgetting to call the magic UIManager.setLayoutAnimationEnabledExperimental(true) function, without which things just tend to Not Work on Android.