This is probably just me and feel free to disregard if this sounds silly, but I really wish miss the getting started guide from a few years ago that (iirc) had you drop an include statement in and go.
I feel like React expects me to have a deep knowledge of JS build tooling when all I care about getting started is building a page locally that works and does cool things.
FWIW this is how Vue's tutorial starts - and another really nice thing they do is teach you the API by entering things into your console on their tutorial page full of components.
I don't really know if this is constructive or useful, I hope it is - I just feel like React expects a lot of new users in a way it didn't used to.
The tutorial asks you to either use CodePen (which requires no build tooling) or Create React App (which requires you to run a command in the terminal but then you don't need to configure anything):
Similarly, the installation page offers you to either download a single HTML file, or to install a CLI that gives you a project that's ready to go: https://reactjs.org/docs/installation.html
Could you clarify what give you an impression that you need to have a deep knowledge of build tooling to follow along?
Dan, it might be worth throwing in links to CodeSandbox/StackBlitz/WebpackBin somewhere obvious in addition to CodePen, since each of those are online IDEs oriented towards working with React.
Hey Dan, I really appreciate you responding here - I know things like Create React App have come in the past couple years, and that people love it - I'm not trying to take anything away from what you've built. I know the way I learned React isn't how anybody is ever going to make anything production quality.
I'll try to clarify. If you don't mind another comparison to Vue, their equivalent page: https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/ says "Or, you can create an index.html file and include Vue with:
<script src="https://unpkg.com/vue"></script>", while your get started page says "If you’d rather use a local development environment, check out the Installation page." I know, if I click there it'll say I have an index.html and I know I shouldn't do it that way, but if I have none of the infrastructure on my computer and I want to build my thing on my computer, I'm looking for the script - not installation instructions.
On that 'how to follow along' page, under prerequisites it says "Note that we’re also using some features from ES6, a recent version of JavaScript. In this tutorial, we’re using arrow functions, classes, let, and const statements. You can use Babel REPL to check what ES6 code compiles to.". If this was the first React tutorial I ever looked at I'd be completely lost here and concluding I don't understand the prerequisites. If I know anything about 'relatively new' things in Javascript or Babel then I assume that I'm expected to use it somehow to actually use those relatively new things in my browser, but I have no idea how.
Also, scrolling down a bit, "if you prefer to write code in your editor" is a list of 6 steps, one of which is installing Node and another is "Follow the installation instructions to create a new project." I might not need deep knowledge, but this feels like a lot of stuff to do to follow a tutorial in my editor.
Here's my story about the old, do-it-all-locally tutorial: I'd just started an internship, and got a brief about doing some dynamic UI generation from schemas in .net stuff I'd never used, and was meant to be designing a schema to use. I had no idea what that should look like, so I learned React with your old tutorial and within a few hours could iterate on a schema to build UI components like theirs in the browser. This was amazingly helpful to me, and looked way more impressive than it actually was when I showed the boss! I just doubt that I'd do that based on your current tutorial, because I'd be on a Windows machine and get hung up installing NPM or something silly.. and that feels like a shame to me.
Thanks for sharing the concerns. It's a bit of a tough balance. For example before we mentioned the prerequisites like understanding ES5 and basics of ES6, people were complaining that we don't make the assumed knowledge clear. Before we used ES6, people were complaining our code doesn't look like the ones they see in examples and docs for other libraries. Et cetera. Somebody always is upset, although maybe we're just doing a bad job. :-(
We do offer an HTML file to download that you can tinker with, but only on "Installation" page rather than the Tutorial. Maybe we can unify them somehow.
Overall, it's frustrating that people tell us about these issues once a year when we release something, instead of raising an issue and discussing it there. :-) If somebody told us on GitHub this is a problem, we would have fixed it a long time ago.
I agree it's a tough balance, and I definitely wouldn't say you're doing a bad job, I hope I don't come across like I think that you are!
I appreciate that frustration, I didn't raise this as a Github issue because it didn't feel actionable and I don't want to spam all your maintainers with a complaint without having something more concrete to suggest. I'll try to put something together though if that'd be useful :)
Thanks! I agree the simplicity is compelling. Our Getting Started page does offer CDN script tags as an option but it's seemed like create-react-app is a better tool for most people getting started on a new app so we've had that more prominently.
I feel like React expects me to have a deep knowledge of JS build tooling when all I care about getting started is building a page locally that works and does cool things.
FWIW this is how Vue's tutorial starts - and another really nice thing they do is teach you the API by entering things into your console on their tutorial page full of components.
I don't really know if this is constructive or useful, I hope it is - I just feel like React expects a lot of new users in a way it didn't used to.