My JavaScript frontend ticket has a deadline for tomorrow and I’m still lost in the woods - what should I do?!

We’ve all been there. Working with frontends is hard. No matter you’re from Ruby, PHP, Java, .NET or Python - we all meet here, you need to write JavaScript at some point.

And what alternatives do you have?

  • Maybe jQuery? It looks great at the first glance. Generate some HTML on the backend and then add some “small” jQuery code. Suddenly you are duplicating all the backend logic in jQuery. Your “small” code is big now. With any non-trivial examples you have bugs. Have you ever tried to build an UI wizard this way?
  • Let’s try Angular! You just need to learn about dependency injection, scopes, directives, services, factories, providers, config statements, $scope.$apply, digest cycle, data flow… not to mention child scopes, isolated scopes, transcludent scopes… did I mentioned scopes? Don’t even look at Ember - the learning curve is the same there.
  • Maybe something non-mainstream? There is a new framework.js every day. But do you want to be responsible for this choice? Are they going to support new browsers? What about mobile performance? Can you rely on authors that they won’t end maintaining it tomorrow? Do your team will agree it’s the best choice?

Huh. That does not look good. Not to mention it’s JavaScript. It has quirks. It has an unwieldy syntax. It surprises you on every step.

You need something better

Wouldn’t it be great if you can work with the better JavaScript? With saner object model and nicer syntax? What if building your UI would be easier? Pass some data and poof! - describe what UI you want, based on this data. Data changes? Don’t worry, we’ll handle it for you - just tell us how your UI should look with this new data. No more mutating DOM manually! And all of that without a framework. Without 20 new terms to learn, no usage of idioms specific to this framework only. No implicitness. You keep the full control over your code.

It’s possible today!

Say hello to React.js!

  • It’s possible to rely on the work of one of the biggest players on the market - Facebook. There are more - Netflix, Airbnb, Yahoo!
  • It’s possible to use the new version of JavaScript - called ECMAScript 2015. It comes with major syntax improvements, class syntax and more. And you’ll get a ton of support from people using it today in production builds - it’s the default for them. And you can use it today - it’ll work in your browser thanks to transpilers.
  • It’s possible to learn a technology you need in a matter of hours, not weeks. I built my first production UI in React in 7 hours, without the previous experience in this technology.
  • It’s possible to use focused tools - React takes care of only the view layer. Use what works best for your other frontend concerns - like AJAX calls, models and so on.
  • It’s possible to use functional approach in your codebase, making features in a faster and more reliable way - without resorting to functional languages like ClojureScript. JavaScript is good enough to provide a lot useful functional idioms that are easy to grasp and makes you more productive.

What do we know?

We think that React.js is the best choice when it comes to build dynamic frontends. We used it in 5 big projects we were working on. We got over 2000+ hours of experience with it. And we want to share our knowledge with you - and we already do. We got a Rails meets React.js book, aimed to Ruby on Rails developers. We’ve created and maintain the React.js koans (2000+ stars on GitHub already!).

Practical examples all the way

We wrote a book which is a perfect entry point to this world of the modern JavaScript tooling. It’s not a full ES2015 bible, nor is it a full React.js 16 API description. We went straight to the main value - how you can implement typical UI widgets. This is the focus on the book, as many practical examples as possible. You will learn different ways of approaching a typical JavaScript task - building a specific widget.

React.js by example cover View the sample chapter

Buy the book now

What’s in it? Widgets - the basic blocks of your UI

React.js by example contains more than 180 pages of real-world examples. In every each of them we explain various mechanisms of React and ECMAScript 2015. With current version of book, you will learn how to create some popular widgets like:

If you’ve never worked with React before, we prepared a starting chapter where we explain the basics of React.

You’ll learn 3 main techniques of working with React.js

  • Start from the scratch and build multiple, simple React components, step by step.
  • Start with HTML and wrap it all with a React component, slowly extracing data and behaviour out of it.
  • Start with HTML and wrap a small part of it with the React component.

You’ll learn common JavaScript idioms and principles - working with immutable data. You’ll learn just enough ECMAScript 2015 to make you productive - you’ll see features like destructuring, enhanced object literals and string interpolation in actions.

You’ll learn the best practices of working with React - stubbing data with default properties, placeholder behaviour handlers and more. You’ll learn how to use the powerful React ecosystem to make your work easier. There are examples using the great React-Bootstrap library which is a set of pre-defined components from the Bootstrap CSS framework you can use.

Get your copy now - over 900 copies already sold!

While we deeply believe that React by Example brings the best value to you today, there is no silver bullet when it comes to learning people. If you are disappointed with the content, there is a 100% refund policy. No questions asked.

You can read a free chapter about the password strength meter here.

Book is up to date with React 16!

Interested? Grab your copy now for the price of $49!

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