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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

As someone who knows Angular and Knockout. I found this great. Because react is a different way of thinking IMO that most tutorials I read were not easy to get up and running so I just threw in the towel and forgot about react. Most people make too many assumptions on the skill level of the reader (myself included when I blog) and it can be frustrating.

Thanks.

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Agreed, I've built some pretty big and complex UI's with Knockout.js and this was an excellent guide into something else.

Really well written as well.

Thank you :) Totally agree, I knew Angular coming into React and it threw me off quite a bit as well.

Knockout.js is my favorite because it doesn't make me hack my HTML documents into pieces if I don't want to, but if I want to, it lets me make web components that work all the way back to IE6.

I also like that it doesn't require anything beyond normal HTML to make templates and it doesn't require learning some huge framework just to bind a simple data-set into the page. You can also read through the entire code-base in an afternoon.

I worked on a project with around 20 developers using knockout (with two lead developers essentially writing their own framework as we went) and it was a ridiculous mess. I think it can be a good tool for prototyping, but it is horrible on a large app. You're always changing some observable and having something far far away break completely. React with immutable.js is much better because you really can focus on one component at a time in complete isolation.

Knockout on it's own is just data-binding, we ended up using this as the SPA framework around Knockout: http://durandaljs.com/

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