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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

maybe you can send me to the right tutorial. I'm a backend, distributed systems engineer. I have worked on eye-watering scale. React is anything but simple to me.

I tried create-react-app, the thing built and downloaded for several minutes, and then there was a nest of file relationships that I didn't grok. It seemed like any change required three files to be updated. Lots of ancillary things like bundlers, packers, tree shakers, lions, tigers, and bears, oh my. After an hour, I didn't get what I was doing. Somehow, altering this function over here made this other thing over there go "moo."

I used to do web development back in like 2001. I understand the web, http, css, html, and basic js. I'm not up on all the latest, but I have a very firm base.

I got htmx working and pretty much fully digested in the same amount of time I wasted on React and have produced a working prototype. I find htmx to be like how the web used to be. It makes sense.

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FWIW, create-react-app is overloaded with every package you could ever potentially want to use for some weird reason. It's way overkill and I wouldn't recommend using it.

It's much better just to use Vite with React as a plugin. Then you only need to install three React packages to get your app going.

The best tutorial I've used was "Road to React" by Robin Weiruch. His example app you learn is how to build a Hacker News front page. Very clear and it goes step by step.

Most of the tutorials online are all over the place, or mix Class tutorials with Hooks tutorials, or starts adding in things like Redux (which aren't needed).

The person you're responding to is correct, at it's core React is very simple, especially if you just stick to hooks. Most of my code is just bog standard HTML (as JSX), CSS and JS with a few React hooks thrown in.

FWIW, I've been doing frontend dev since '94 and personally find React jives the most for me and how normal HTML/JS/CSS work. I can see why people would like HTMX, but I've never liked overloading HTML attributes as some strange event model. But it's good there are choices.

React has very good documentation and an excellent tutorial. Here is a link to it: https://react.dev/learn . I recommend doing the exercises. They really help you learn React.

Create React App should not be used because it is no longer maintained. Here is its GitHub repro: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/commits/main/ . It has had very few updates since July 2022. This is bad because it needs constant updates because it depends on a large number of packages and those packages are constantly releasing security updates.

That doesn't sound like a good selling point for react.

create-react-app is not react

While true, if cargo was exploitable we'd say it was rust.

To be fair, this would be more analogous to some random person creating a crate called 'create-rust-app' and then abandoning it. Hardly a signal that Rust is dead.

Never said it was saying react/rust were dead, I said it "doesnt look good". Those words were not in my mouth.

I understand your confusion and dismay over React because I'm myself a backend developer and the kind of complexity doesn't exist in backend tech stack.

But this all or none of it has anything to do with React rather with a broken language design which never imagined anyone would write JavaScript worth more than a few paragraphs in a single file.

That's where tons of bundlers come into play from parcel and webpack to vite.

But then there are some language extensions that must be transpiled before they can be bundled. Your JSX comes to mind.

Typescript can be considered in the same league.

Minus all that - Modern React has a very minimal surface area, very few concepts and that's about it.

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