Andy Shu, news engineer with Initium Lab, gave a brief tutorial about ReactJS, the Web UI library from Facebook,
in Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) on 18 September 2015. The event was organized by the Open Innovation Lab of CUHK.
Andy introduced the basics of React and demonstrated making a simple quiz app from the ground up with React.
Here is the video recoding of the tutorial:
The video is also available on Youku.
Key time points
00:00 - Introduction to Initium Lab and the Speaker
05:02 - What is React
16:21 - Necessary packages and tools
25:07 - Coding
After the tutorial, a Q&A session was held (not recorded due to technical issues). Afterwards, a few participants stayed for further discussion.
Supporting Materials
Please visit tryreact.initiumlab.com for supporting materials used in the tutorial, such as the quiz.html, from which you can follow Andy step by step. Intermediate coding samples are also available.
How to pick up JavaScript
When asked about how he learnt JavaScript in a short period of time, Andy recommended the JavaScript track of Codecademy for absolute beginners, JavaScript: The Good Parts for a deeper look into the language, and Professional JavaScript for Web Developers for more comprehensive understanding. He also said frequent practice was crucial to learning.
Errata
Under JavaScript strict mode, this in functions should be undefined, not null.
One might have the impression that in the source code, elements like <h1> are just native HTML elements. That is inaccurate. In fact, they are Virtual DOM elements, implemented by React.