👨‍💻 I Spent 200 Hours on React Courses. Here are the Best.

That's right, I spent a good chunk of my life - and a fair amount of money - taking React courses.

I did this for three reasons:

1. I wanted to learn React to a level where I could confidently use it on a side project.
2. The first 15 years of my career have been dedicated to making online courses. I've worked behind-the-scenes at Udacity, Pluralsight, and TrainSignal. When I want to learn something, online courses are my first choice.
3. I couldn't find recommendations with any meaningful discussion about approaches to teaching, learning styles, quality of examples, and other important factors that would impact my experience. I read tons of clickbait listing "The Best React Courses," and waded through dozens of forums full of stans for particular authors and aggressive arguments for why you should "just read the docs."

So I decided to figure it out myself, and compile my research so others wouldn't have to repeat my journey.

I took the top courses people had mentioned, from a variety of platforms and authors, everywhere from Udemy and Pluralsight, Scrimba and Frontend Masters to Kent Dodds' Epic React. In total, I spent at least one hour on about 40 courses, and took almost 20 entire courses.

In this post, I'll share the highlights. If you're interested to see the full report, check out: https://curricular.dev/guides/react_fundamentals/

I looked for courses with the following features:

• Comprehensive Coverage: The course needs to cover the essentials for using React today, including JSX, Components (ideally functional, or both functional and class components), Props, State Management, Side Effects, and React Router.
• Learning Features: Real skill development happens with fingers on keys. We looked for courses with more than just videos; exercises and projects were essential.
• Real World Application: A great React course teaches you how to use React on a production application. We looked for examples and best practices from professional experience.
• Support and Community: Learning is better together! I looked for courses with thriving communities and rapid, helpful support for learners.

Best Overall Course: Learn React by Bob Ziroll (Scrimba)

Scrimba’s Learn React is comprehensive, builds well from the basics through foundational topics, provides the most hands-on practice of any course I evaluated.

If you like learning by building projects and want lots of hands-on practice, you’ll love this course. Scrimba’s methodical approach to teaching concepts means you’re practicing something right after learning it, and then putting everything together into a project.

The innovative interface, where you can pause the screencast and begin coding right where the instructor left off, almost feels like magic.

The course includes eight fun and engaging portfolio projects. Many (not all) of these projects are professional-grade. And you can pay to have your code reviewed, which is hugely beneficial.

Overall, this course is an almost unbelievable value, since it is so thorough and well-produced, while also being available for free.

Get it at scrimba.com ($18/month subscription; Free Option)

Runner-up: Complete Guide to React, v8 by Brian Holt (Frontend Masters)

This 6 hour workshop teaches 85% of the real-world React footprint. It's a great option for seasoned JavaScript developers looking to get up to speed quickly with React.

Taught by one of the world's leading React experts, this workshop is one of the best starting points for learning React the way it’s actually used in top organizations like Reddit, Netflix, and Stripe.

Beyond a tutorial on components, state, and hooks, this teaches you how real world developers utilize React - and what features you shouldn't bother with.

In this course, Brian Holt walks step by step through the development of a pet adoption site. While it's not the deepest dive into React's core concepts, it’s enough to get you started with some meaty React projects or to learn advanced topics.

Frontend Masters has a complete React Path with an additional 15 hours of core React content and electives. If you're serious about working with React professionally, we recommend subscribing and taking the full path - at least the core content.

This course doesn't include hand-on practice, so if you're a novice developer, you'll want to supplement with some independent projects in order to be ready to use React professionally.

Overall, this course is a great value for the price and the time involved.

Get it at frontendmasters.com ($39/mo subscription)

Also Great: Intro to React (Fullstack Open)

An impressive free, text-based course developed in partnership with tech companies, that offers feedback on coding exercises.

The course is part of a larger fullstack development curriculum, so it's a great option for novice coders and aspiring fullstack developers.

The curriculum is text-based with hands-on exercises. The explanations are thorough and well-designed to progress from topic to topic. As a result, the course feels like an extension of the official React documentation with some added hands-on application.

In addition to well-written material, the authors curate some valuable free resources.

You can also submit exercises for grading and feedback, which is incredibly valuable for learning.

Overall, while it isn’t quite as engaging or real-world applicable as the Scrimba or Frontend Masters courses we’re recommending, we preferred it to any of the Coursera courses we tested, and most of the other courses with screencasts. It’s a terrific free option, even if you don't complete the rest of the Fullstack Open curriculum.

Get it at fullstackopen.com (Free)

Also Great: React 18 Path (Pluralsight)

(disclaimer: I worked for Pluralsight from 2013-2018)

This path is a collection of short video courses taught by industry experts. The courses are concise and typically cover the core topics without too much overlap.

If you're an experienced developer looking to quickly get up to speed with React, this is a great option.

Pluralsight's authors are the main draw here, as experts Cory House and others guide you through real-world React usage. Similar to Frontend Masters' Complete Guide to React, this expert perspective helps you focus on learning the features you'll actually use on professional React projects.

This path includes an adaptive assessment that measures your proficiency with the library. The assessment can give you a good idea for how your React knowledge stacks up against other Pluralsight users and areas to target for additional study.

Overall, it's a solid choice for screencast training by expert authors, but if you're a novice developer, or looking to get really good at React before working with it professionally, you should supplement with independent practice and projects.

Get the learning path at pluralsight.com ($29/mo)

Yeah The React Docs Are Great, Too (React.dev)

OK the people who were yelling in the forums about the React Docs are partially right. The docs are excellent, particularly if you're an experienced developer.

But if you prefer to start your learning through videos, there are better options.

Each article includes a few coding challenges to illustrate the concepts. While the challenges aren't grounded in real-world scenarios, in most of the exercises, you're asked to fix broken code to make the code render, which is a fantastic way to learn and fairly unique in courseware. AND these challenges are actually lots of fun.

My biggest knock on the React Docs are the quality of the examples; most of the examples are toy problems, enough to illustrate the concept. But these examples aren't going to teach you how React works in production. You have to go elsewhere to learn that.

So by itself, the React Docs won't teach you how to build a production-ready application with React. Again, if you're an experienced developer and have a project in mind where you can work with React on a larger scale, you'll probably be fine to work on that along with the documentation.

Read the Docs at react.dev/learn (Free)

Conclusion

There are actually lots of other good courses covering React, but I believe these are the absolute best available, and the best combination of quality and value.

I'm still working on reviewing the newly-released React.gg from UI.dev. So far, it's a solid hands-on course that's also a lot of fun. I'm excited to continue.

I've also been working on reviewing the top courses on a variety of topics. If you found this helpful and want my recommendation for a particular topic, visit curricular.dev, and if you don't see the topic you're looking for, let me know.