HACKER Q&A
📣 manuelabeledo

Best React and TypeScript book for experienced programmers?


After almost a couple decades dedicated to backend development, I happened to end up in a typescript/node/react shop. Job is great! But for the first time, I feel like I'm lacking the basics to perform adequately.

So far, it seems that most of the resources I have been consulting are very opinionated, i.e. in many areas, there seem to be too much flexibility, at least compared to other programming languages and/or frameworks.

I have to take a quite long flight in a few hours, and I would love to dive in a book (books?) that could help me bridge the gap between what I now know, i.e. Java + Spring, Python + Flask, a bit of Rust + Rocket, etc., and what I need to know, this being modern Typescript, Node.js, and React programming.

Thanks in advance folks.

  👤 huy-nguyen Accepted Answer ✓
The React team is working on a beta version of React tutorial that is much more organized and up to date (using function components and hooks instead of classes) than what’s in the production site: https://beta.reactjs.org/learn. I think it’s easily the best tutorial out there because it explains concepts very clearly.
👤 aristofun
This is a great overview of some deep parts of TS

https://github.com/basarat/typescript-book

From personal experience the biggest issue to overcome when migrating from java etc. was to embrace prototype based OOP and the functional nature of JS (not in theoretical sense), where class keyword is just a syntax sugar over function with closures etc.

Nothing looks uglier than TS/JS code written by experienced java/C# programmer with no js experience :)

👤 matthewwolfe
If you haven’t already, step 1 would be to read through the React docs. I think there is a beta version floating around for React 18, but the current docs are definitely sufficient. Maybe pair that with a local environment setup to run the examples, maybe a codesandbox if you don’t want to figure out how to get an environment set up immediately
👤 wetpaws
https://reactjs.org/
👤 just_mc
I haven't read this book, but this guys videos are really good and he focuses quite a bit on React development.

https://no-bs-ts.myshopify.com/products/no-bs-ts-the-book

👤 joshxyz
the official docs