Learning React 2nd Edition Review

People often say that if you want to use React, you should just read the official documentation. But is that really enough? Every time I use React, I run into something confusing, and it’s not just once or twice. Whenever that happens, I painfully open up codesandbox and… test things out one by one. Is what I know actually correct? Does React really behave the way I think it does? By now I’ve been making a living with React for about four months, and I’ve read two books (one of them twice), yet there’s still so much I don’t know. One way or another, I miss the days of using Vue.js, when things just worked the way I expected. Fortunately, this book, “Learning React, 2nd Edition,” gave me a few guidelines. It explains in detail several behaviors that had been deeply confusing to me. useEffect, useReducer, useLayoutEffect, and so on. It delivers wisdom so seemingly trivial yet so valuable that I almost missed it. Thankfully, the explanations aren’t difficult, and the book isn’t thick either. You can finish it in no time. That said, the translation of Chapters 7 and 8, which I consider the most important in this book, is disappointing. Chapter 8 especially so. There are even cases where the code and the explanation don’t line up. The edition I read is the first printing of the 2nd edition, so I hope the errors are fixed in the second printing.

20210928