It’s been 5 years since React Native was introduced by Facebook, cross-platform Mobile App Development has taken a wider area in the app market, as many of the big unicorns are switching from native development to React Native. Here are some of my experienced tips after learning React Native to make your learning journey much better.
I'm not going to talk about a technical aspect here, you can get those tips almost anywhere, this will be an unconventional approach to make the learning better. I'm going to talk about how you can leverage your development with a professional approach to handle your React-Native projects & how to use the resources more efficiently etc.
Start Small
As a beginner the biggest mistake you can possibly make is not going through the smallest parts, not learning the smallest parts can really become an annoying thing, as you go through the higher concepts you will be writing code having no idea why you are even using that component in your code. So start with the smallest concepts, I will recommend learning about the basic components of React Native (only if you are not much familiar with React.js) but if you are familiar with React already then you have to make sure that you know the difference between the components in React Native and React.js.
Now we can assume that you have a little knowledge about how components are going to behave and where to use them for making your apps. Before going ahead to the additional parts of React Native, make sure that you are pretty comfortable with the workspace, most of the time I used to run into errors and try to find bugs in my lines of code for hours & turns out that I wasn’t keeping up with the workplace well, so make sure that you are not doing this mistake.
Leverage built-in components
At the starting point of learning React-Native, you will barely find any problem with the built-in components that come with React Native, but at a sudden point, you will find them not that useful as the inbuilt components are not that great. But you can make your own components like the way you want them to look and behave.
Using 3rd party Libraries will be your go-to option if are not that much into making your own component. But I will highly recommend you try to make your components as you can modify them the way you want, as 3rd party Libraries' components don’t come with this much flexibility.
Learn the Object Destructuring pattern
If you are already good with JavaScript and React then you don't have to worry about that, but when it comes to being a beginner none of that will make sense &if you are going ahead without learning Object Destructuring Pattern, your code will be messed up all the time & as the app gets bigger keeping it flexible gets even harder, this pattern works like a charm for making your apps super flexible.
There will be cases when you will run into errors & fixing those errors in your code without any structural pattern will be a pain every time you try to work on it.
Make modifications
At this stage you can make a very basic app with React Native having simple user functionality, now you have to learn breaking down the components into much smaller parts, try to modify your components in your own ways as you will get to know how the APIs works with them, it will be a much easier job in case you want to make small changes in your apps.
Try to change your code and see if you caught any errors in the expo-cli, read the errors and learn how you can avoid these errors because if you are getting too many errors while developing apps with React-Native there will be times when you are going to lose the productivity of your workflow.
Learn To Add Features
While making apps with React Native, this one is really an essential step, now you have to figure taking your app to the next level as you will be learning how to Authenticate users in your app, how to navigate between pages, making your app more & more cross-platform friendly as your have to test your app on both devices (iOS & Android).
Try to learn how to implement features from third-part libraries in your app as it will be an easier path instead of digging into every component. You can try implementing forms and validation in your forms, most of the time in any apps you are going to make a wider user base (you will be using formik a lot of times in that case).
Read the full post at: https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/how-to-learn-react-native-in-2021-so-it-doesnt-suck-735c9bcc0a05
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