I'm a freelance coder who builds small-medium apps and my front-end stack primarily consists of Bootstrap+jquery. This combo has never let me down until now even with all kinds of features, functionality and complexity thrown at it. I've built dashboards with line charts, puzzles and MCQs, grids and tabular components to edit data, etc. and it was all very seamless.

But when I keep hearing the discussions here and on other places in social media, they make me feel like I'm stuck in a very different century! There is no doubt that React is a well-known, popular and robust piece of software but one thing that dissuades me from getting into it is the whole monstrous npm system of components around it. It seems to be quite integrated with node when it comes to some react components like next, nuxt or whatever. Is it not possible to just like include react through CDN with link or script tags and still make good use of it?

More specifically, I want to know what can I hope to achieve if I migrate from jquery to react? I'm quite tied to the jquery way of doing things right from DOM manipulation to event handling to things like cloning and reusing HTML components in <div> blocks. Is there any established guide or path for folks like us to migrate from jquery and react? And to begin with, is this a good idea even?

New job. I've been wanting to learn something new for a while, so I took a project where a lot of React is done. I'm learning it from scratch while I work with React.

I have some comments about it.

1. React makes front end work a lot more like programming -- I like that!
2. Javascript has changed a lot, and for the better, since I last used it over a decade ago.
3. The React-Redux tool kit is the bomb. It should be integrated/absorbed into React. I can't see any reason not to use it, even for small applications as it is less wordy wherever you use it.
4. The updating of state values should be more automatic, especially for flag variables not tied to GUI components. It is the major source of hassles with React
5. Udemy React videos. My company makes them available free of charge to employees. I've sampled videos from a number of courses. I'm not a fan of the instructors showing you how to do things in older, less efficient ways first in a learning/demo project, the ERASING that code to do it a better way. The should include copies of the project at each stage if they do that. I finally figured out that the best way to take notes I can use later is to comment out the old code and put the new more efficient next stage stuff on top.
6. React tests really need to improve. They are often more time consuming than the code itself. The tests have forced me to change my code or do needless testing to get the tests to pass. I had one situation where no matter what I did React test said I didn't cover the code until I broke an else clause off into it's one if clause. Blech.

All in all I've been enjoying learning React. It is neat new ( to me ) thing.

I feel sad that I will likely forget it all when I go back to my specialty language.

I have always believed that sharing what you know is very important.

Altruistically, it helps create a wealth of knowledge that anyone can build upon.

Selfishly, it creates a knowledge-base for your future self, and - arguably more importantly - helps you build a following.

After years of pondering on the idea, I took the plunge and started a screencast on React and React Native. I only published four episodes so far, and they are all very basic, but I'm planning on publishing a video every other day for a few months at least.

It's called RNcasts. You can see it here. I would love to get your opinion on it.

It's by no means perfect, it hurts my eyes to look at it, and it hurts my ears to hear my own voice, but I had to get started somewhere.

Also, I will be sharing my journey of working on this screencast on the RNcasts blog. If you are interested in starting your own screencast or video course, feel free to follow it. I'm hoping to share all I learn, the good and the bad.