Chris Wiegman
In June I changed teams at work and went from building micro services and integrations with GoLang and PHP to building a WordPress plugin written mostly in React and TypeScript.
As a long-time WordPress developer I’ve used plenty of JavaScript over the years but, up to this point, I’ve avoided having to learn React as it was neither something I needed nor, frankly, something I’ve been interested in. It was time for me to ramp up, and fast.
I browsed the courses on Udemy and other platforms but, in the end, I wound up working through React For Beginners by Wes Bos.
Now, I don’t often plug a lot of courses. To be honest I often find video courses extremely difficult to follow and actually learn from. This one was different. From the first lesson through the last the course was well laid out and easy to follow. It took me from zero knowledge of React to enough of an understanding that I can work through the code my new team had already built. That’s not bad for a course I finished in just over a day.
If you’re like me and have been working in WordPress for a while without making the jump to JavaScript, I highly recommend giving it a shot. In a weekend you’ll be able to make more sense out of React as well as what is going on in modern WordPress blocks and other React code.