As someone who dove headfirst into RN without JS/React experience (~5 years of iOS), you don't need to know any of that stuff beforehand.
I haven't gone through (or really looked in-depth) this tutorial, but I can say that the ES{x} features are pretty easy to grok once you've seen and written them a few times. Most of the syntax specifics are easy to pick up just by reading code. The biggest things I'd focus on for starting into RN is:
- React lifecycle (componentDidMount, willUnmount, shouldComponentUpdate, etc)
- Add render counts into your debug builds so you know if components are re-rendering way more than they should (shouldComponentUpdate is your friend here).
Other than that, learn by building. Keep an open mind to frustrations since RN changes rapidly, and the documentation/examples/libraries online are not the most up-to-date.
Nice, I'm going to jump strait into this then. Thanks!
I did find the You Don't Know JS[0] book series extreamly helpful as a C++/Python coder who has only done enough JS to get by. But that is the extent of my prep for learning React Native.
Interestingly, the YDKJS author (Kyle Simpson) is very down on the adoption and heavy usage of ES6 class notation and the over-reliance of the syntactic appearance of a OO-language class systems in JS.
His argument is the abstraction will leak the in-its-own-right powerful delegation system of JS prototypes, so why not just learn/use raw objects or his OLOO (objects-linked-to-other-objects) pattern.
I find it hard to mentally map the ES6 class to the equivalent object+prototype structure it is syntax sugar for, so just throw my hands up and for the most part pretend they are Python style open-objects.
I haven't gone through (or really looked in-depth) this tutorial, but I can say that the ES{x} features are pretty easy to grok once you've seen and written them a few times. Most of the syntax specifics are easy to pick up just by reading code. The biggest things I'd focus on for starting into RN is:
- React lifecycle (componentDidMount, willUnmount, shouldComponentUpdate, etc) - Add render counts into your debug builds so you know if components are re-rendering way more than they should (shouldComponentUpdate is your friend here).
Other than that, learn by building. Keep an open mind to frustrations since RN changes rapidly, and the documentation/examples/libraries online are not the most up-to-date.