There’s a problem with frontend development today: it’s overwhelming. There are thousands of libraries out there, each doing one little thing. Groups of them evolve to become de facto standards, but with no actual standards in sight. The React ecosystem is especially guilty of this: there’s React, Redux, Webpack, Babel, React Router, and on and on. Hundreds of boilerplate projects exist to make this “easier” by bundling a bunch of choices together. “It’ll be easier to learn,” the thinking goes, “if you don’t have to make all the choices yourself.” But the opposite happens: instead of being overwhelmed by the choices, you’re now overwhelmed by the sheer amount of code that came “for free” with the boilerplate, and you have NO IDEA what any of it actually does. That’s a scary place to be. Learning everything at once is massively overwhelming. So in this book, we will take a different approach. A more sane approach. We will learn Pure React. Pure React: The core concepts of React, in isolation, without Redux, Webpack, and the rest. When you achieve what’s contained here – when you learn React cold, you’ll be able to go on and learn all of its friends with ease: Redux, Router, and the rest. Not only will you be able to learn those other libraries, but you will be well- equipped. You’ll have a solid foundation. This book has been designed to get you from zero to React quickly, and with maximum understanding. What you won’t be doing here is what plays out in many tutorials across on the web, where you copy and paste each block of code until you have a working app at the end. “Voila!” they say. “Now you know React and Redux and Webpack!”