React intro notes

A handful notes from the React intro tutorial (which is available at https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/tutorial.html).

• A components render method is called when its state changes
• A components getInitialState method is called once, when the component is setup
• A components componentDidMount method is called once, after the component is rendered for the first time

Oh, wait. They’re actually all here…

I’ll talk about something else then:

Learning React & Redux is hard.

• It breaks conventions, so nothing you thought you knew about JavaScript do you any good.
• It’s going to be a hard transition, especially if you only knew ES5. Because there’s so much (delicious) syntactic sugar in ES6.
• It’s going to be hard to distinguish ES6-magic from JSX-magic from React-magic.
• And when you throw Redux in the mix, it’s all of a sudden not only magic, but weird. And clean. And clumsy. At the same time. Good luck. Help can be given at:

• Codeschool - ES6 course
• Codeschool - React course
• Learn Redux
• Creating your own project. Always a good idea! Start with the link in the intro.