I don’t know if it’s alright to mention my own work, but the book I wrote to teach React is project-based. It’s got a bunch of very small projects and exercises rather than a single massive one, and the later projects review concepts from the earlier ones. It’s called Pure React and it’s digital-only right now (maybe one day I’ll get it printed!) https://daveceddia.com/pure-react/
I'm glad you did! Additionally, is there any reason that I should learn React using Node.js rather than python? I'm not particularly anti-Node.js but I'd rather learn Django simultaneously if it was all the same difference.
Nope! The choice of backend is entirely independent from the choice of front end. React pairs nicely with Django, Rails, Elixir, PHP... anything that can serve static files, basically :)
The only time it could start to matter is if you want to do server-side rendering of the React app, in order to serve complete static HTML for the first page load. It can matter for SEO and page load speed. If you need SSR, you need a backend that supports it. It looks like it's at least possible with Django, according to a 30-second google search: https://github.com/nielslerches/django-react-ssr (ymmv, that repo has 4 stars, so I dunno :)
Not OP but it could be difficult learning two languages and frameworks at the same time. If you really want to use Python for the backend while learning React, perhaps try Flask? It's much simpler than Django, especially for tutorial-type projects.
