Even Dan the creator of Redux says you don't always need Redux and I got along fine without it for a basic app. I was writing clean React code within a day. The component lifecycle took maybe two days to understand? It's so simple I wrote a popular answer about lifecycle on Stackoverflow within a couple weeks of learning it. Want to write a big app with complex state? Sure, you'll want to add Redux to the mix. But it's not a hard requirement and is overkill for small simple apps. You can learn React itself very quickly.
Too late to edit my other response where I meant to point out that in React, Javascript is the templating language, which is one less thing to learn when compared with Angular and others if you already know JavaScript well.
> In order to be able to tell if you need Redux or not for a project, you need to know Redux
Not according to the creator of Redux. His advice is "Instead learn to think in React. Come back to Redux if you find a real need for it, or if you want to try something new. But approach it with caution, just like you do with any highly opinionated tool."
> too many developers overestimate their intelligence and write awful code because they didn't take the time to learn well the tools
No argument there. You do have to go through the entire official tutorial, and I would also recommend the article "Thinking in React", that Dan Abramov referenced above. https://reactjs.org/docs/thinking-in-react.html
I'm not claiming your experience with awful code isn't real, I'm sure it is. But is it because React is difficult to learn? When I learned React I was already good at JavaScript. And I had already learned Angular. Angular took me over a month to start to feel comfortable, and I still felt like I was stumbling around in the dark. The Angular API is very big. With React I was writing code, and code that I still use, within days. And I felt comfortable that I mostly knew what I was doing. When my code got a little more complex, I took a few hours to read about and learn about Higher Order Components. And when I needed routing I taught myself React Router in one day, and began answering questions about it on StackOverflow shortly after. Did I take the time in each case to completely understand the API and is that different from what other devs are doing? Possibly. But the point is that the React API did not take me weeks to learn. It's a simple API and there just isn't much there to learn. The React lifecycle for example has less than a dozen methods. It's super simple. Maybe other devs do struggle with getting such a simple API internalized, or maybe they just didn't go through the entire tutorial carefully enough. With React Router I am constantly answering questions that have answers right in the documentation. So maybe what you are seeing is lazy programmers, not a difficult API. In any case, in the interest of not going around in circles here with a difference of opinion, my most important point was comparing the simplicity of learning a UI library (React) vs. a very complex framework like Angular. React was WAY more simple to learn in comparison. And it should be. It does far less. Fair?
