Kirupa Chinnathambi has spent most of his life trying to teach others to love web development as much as he does.

In 1999, before blogging was even a word, he started posting tutorials on kirupa.com. In the years since then, he has written hundreds of articles, penned a few books (none as good as this one, of course!), and recorded a bunch of videos you can find on YouTube. When he isn’t writing or talking about web development, he spends his waking hours helping make the web more awesome as a Program Manager at Microsoft. In his nonwaking hours, he is probably sleeping—or writing about himself in the third person.

You can find him on Twitter (twitter.com/kirupa), Facebook (facebook.com/kirupa), or email (kirupa@kirupa.com). Feel free to contact him anytime.

Learning React

A hands-on guide to building web applications using React and Redux

As far as new web frameworks and libraries go, React is quite the runaway success. It not only deals with the most common problems developers face when building complex apps, it throws in a few additional tricks that make building the visuals for such apps much, much easier.

What React isn’t, though, is beginner-friendly and approachable. Until now. In Learning React , author Kirupa Chinnathambi brings his fresh, clear, and very personable writing style to help web developers new to React understand its fundamentals and how to use it to build really performant (and awesome) apps.

The only book on the market that helps you get your first React app up and running in just minutes, Learning React is chock-full of colorful illustrations to help you visualize difficult concepts and practical step-by-step examples to show you how to apply what you learn.

Build your first React app

Create components to define parts of your UI

Combine components into other components to build more complex UIs

Use JSX to specify visuals without writing full-fledged JavaScript

Deal with maintaining state

Work with React’s way of styling content

Make sense of the mysterious component lifecycle

Build multi-page apps using routing and views

Optimize your React workflow using tools such as Node, Babel, webpack, and others

Use Redux to make managing your app data and state easy