What’s Next

I hope you’ve enjoyed the exercises in this book. You can now build simple apps with React, and that’s exactly what you need to do next. Before you build anything else, you should configure a local environment and configure your editor to work for a React project. I cover that in detail here. 

Once you have an easy way to create a local environment and good tools in your editor to make your experience a more pleasant one, you should build a few small apps with the knowledge you gained in this book. Focus on the simple core concepts you gained here and build cool things. Build other games! See this page for some ideas. Build the infamous TODOs app. Build that web app idea your friends and relatives keep telling you about. Build something you care for.

Don’t jump into the advanced areas yet—you should master the fundamentals first. Most of what needs to be done in simple React applications can be done with what you learned in this book. You’ll need to learn many other things eventually. Here’s a list of some of the important concepts and tools that you should learn after getting comfortable with the fundamentals:

• Learn the rest of React Hooks and understand the cases they cover. Most importantly, learn about useReducer, useRef, useContext, and useCallback.
• Learn about testing React components. One of the popular testing frameworks out there for React is Jest, and it’s what I use in all my React projects. It’s great! Give it a spin.
• Learn how to use React applications to server-side render static HTML as the starting state for the same React application that’ll run in the browser.
• Learn how to associate React components with URLs and how to integrate them into the browser’s history API.
• Learn how to profile and analyze the performance of React components.
• Learn about the lifecycle methods in React class-based components and the error boundaries that you can use with them. Learn the abstractions and patterns that are usually used with them, like higher-order components and the “render-props” method.
• Learn about dynamic props validation with tools like PropTypes, which will give better error messages in the console if you (or other members on your team) use a certain component incorrectly. You should also explore static analysis tools like TypeScript or Flow. You’ll probably find them hard to use and hate them at first, but give them a fair try. After a few weeks, you’ll see the HUGE advantage they bring to the table.
• Learn about React Cache and Suspense. It’s still brand new as I am finishing this book, but it will be the standard way for a React component to work with remote data (and fetch it with Ajax).

These topics are beyond the scope of this beginner-level book. I cover them in other books and courses. Check out my React Beyond the Basics book here, and other advanced-level resources about React here.

After getting comfortable with React for the web, take a look at React Native. The same skills that you gain for React will enable you to build native iOS and Android applications. You’ll be up and running in no time.

You should also take a look at GraphQL. It’s nothing short of a game changer! If you’re planning to build a data API to work with your React applications, do not start until you read a book about GraphQL, which I happen to have written. You can find GraphQL In Action here.

Finally, you’ll need to learn Node.js. Your React application will most likely end up hosted as a Node application, and you’ll need tools like Webpack and Babel to work with React (these are Node packages). If you ever decide to server-side-render your React application, using a Node web server is the easiest way to do that. Learn as much about Node as you possibly can—you will not regret it. Check out my Node Beyond the Basics book here.

I also have a few video courses about React, GraphQL, and Node that are available at Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning, and jsComplete. You can find the links to all them here.

Please reach out with questions or feedback. Tweet me @samerbuna or find me at the jsComplete help Slack channel.

Thanks for reading. Now get busy!