Testing your skills is not what will guide you towards improvement. Instead, learn by doing. Come up with another learning project and complete it. Do another. And one more. And so on. Start with something simple and gradually challenge yourself to achieve more. (If you're not the idea guy, here's how you might generate these ideas reliably .) You will naturally do some research while building these, and it's perfectly fine! Just don't get too dependent on tutorials . Coding-wise, here are a few things that you can practice: Model real-world objects and behaviors to get better at object-oriented design and modeling data in general. For example: try to model a credit card. And a POS to charge that card. And an ATM to lookup its balance. Think about how that could be implemented. Test. Instead of testing your objects and functions by hand, write simple functions that call "test" the behavior of these. You can write the tests right inside that file, and you can use pytest to run the tests. For example, to test a function that would add two numbers, you could write a function that would do `assert add(1, 2) == 3`. Another thing that can boost your own understanding of programming concepts — any kind of concept — is blogging about your "aha" moments and discoveries. My partner is a beginner Django learner, he recently did 3 relatively "simple" posts about Django, targeted at other beginners like himself, and they got well received on Reddit (http://reddit.com/user/arevej)

If you are not doing any native modules by yourself, developing for Android is not that much different from developing for iOS. That's kinda the point of react-native :) Many resources out there have examples in iOS because running on an iOS simulator is easier than running on Android simulator (which is slow as a crawl, and even did freeze my MBP a couple of times) and definitely easier than getting an Android device to run on. However, much of what these resources show applies as much to Android as it does to iOS, so you shouldn't feel pressured into finding "Android specific" RN resources — make use of what you have! It looks to me what you're asking, though, is more along the lines of "How do I learn RN best". Learning can be fun, but it can also be daunting and you can feel like you don't know where to go next, or even what to do now. So this is my advice about learning in general: Relying on tutorials too much will only get in the way of learning . Instead, go through the official docs and the official tutorial, maybe follow a tutorial or two, but then, instead of finding a tutorial for everything, pause. Following tutorials is good to get an initial idea, but terrible for retaining knowledge. Practice, on the other hand, helps you solidify the concepts and knowledge in your brain. Come up with a learning project , and go about making it. You might encounter things that you don't know yet—and it's perfectly fine. Searching and reading about things in the context of a specific problem likewise does wonders to understanding.

The mechanics of how UI components work mostly stays the same and doesn't deprecate, though. Ultimately, the call is all yours. If you have a specific design that you have to abide by, you may find that trying to fit existing UI libraries to that design will be not the easiest task in the world, and it might be easier to start with custom UI components altogether. If you are just trying to throw around a simple app as quickly as possible, UI libraries can definitely help. Same as with Twitter Bootstrap on the web. You can use it when prototyping, but if you want something more custom, you will have to style (at least partially) the UI by yourself. Personally, I'm not a big fan of UI libraries and implement visual components from scratch on my client projects.

Both are valid options and there is no single "best" or "worst". If you learn React first, you'll find that there are a ton more resources about it. And many of the things you will learn while learning React, will also easily transfer to React Native. On the other hand, the web has quite a few idiosyncrasies of its own. (Fwiw, I have a post titled How do you go from React to React Native? which you may find relevant. I also have a couple of posts on animations .) If you learn React Native first, there are less resources but it's not as big of a deal. There are no web idiosyncraties, but there are mobile idiosyncrasies — which you'll have to deal with if you want to do RN anyway, so if the goal is mobile apps, starting with RN might be cool, too. It looks to me what you're asking, though, is more along the lines of "How do I learn RN best". Learning can be fun, but it can also be daunting and you can feel like you don't know where to go next, or even what to do now. So this is my advice about learning itself: Relying on tutorials too much will only get in the way of learning . Instead, go through the official docs and the official tutorial, maybe follow a tutorial or two, but then, instead of finding a tutorial for everything, pause. Following tutorials is good to get an initial idea, but terrible for retaining knowledge. Practice, on the other hand, helps you solidify the concepts and knowledge in your brain. Come up with a learning project , and go about making it. You might encounter things that you don't know yet—and it's perfectly fine. Searching and reading about things in the context of a specific problem likewise does wonders to understanding.

There are as many approaches as there are people. Some will work for one, some won't, it's fine. The way I have usually been learning, and this is what I've seen others implement successfully too, is to learn by doing. Learn the basics. Usually the official docs are a great place to get started. Maybe follow an official tutorial. DO NOT start running around and learning about a myriad of other libraries — Redux, Relay, React-Router, GraphQL, this that and that. Build a toy project. (If you're not the "idea person", well, neither am I! And yet, there are ways to come up with an idea: http://goshakkk.name/learning-project-ideas/) You will learn insane amounts of knowledge in this phase, things will "connect" and start to fit in in your head. Doing only tutorials that hand-walk you the entire time does not give you this, they kind of show you a thing, but you have no freakin' idea how and why it works. While building a project, you WILL get stuck at times, and it's cool, you're not alone in that. Try to help yourself first. Do the researchin'. Try to frame your problem differently and see if it makes the googling (or plain gathering the solution by yourself!) easier. Even writing it down in words can help you see something that you were missing under your nose up to this point. Do not obsess with libraries. Don't run around dropping X and Y and Z into your project randomly. Try to do as much as possible by yourself and only then if something starts to hurt badly, consider bringing in a third party library. I've written about a more specific application of this rule in the case of state management with Redux et co: http://goshakkk.name/redux-vs-mobx-vs-flux-etoomanychoices/ but it applies on a more general level as well. Do not try to find a ready component for everything. This is important for two reasons. One, as a beginner, you'd want to do as much hands-down as possible. Two, each dependency is a liability and should be analyzed as such. And research and such takes time, and often, it's more time effective to just write your own from scratch. Especially in cases when implementing something overly specific to your app . Those are just a few points that popped up immediately. Feel free to reply or ask something specific. (Update: I've published a post that further touches on some of the points of this answer https://goshakkk.name/next-steps-official-react-tutorial/ and https://goshakkk.name/no-tutorial-for-everything/)

I'm super-glad you liked it! Is there anything in the post that was not clear or could be improved?

True, it does take time and practice to see a certain decision wasn't right. Nobody is saying you have to be 100% correct upfront :) Even the best developers start with what works ("green") and only then improve that ("refactor")

People always regret things... almost everyone. Tell you what... even if you did pick up programming earlier, you'd still have some other regrets. I got my first laptop when I was 9. By 10, I was so sick of spending my time gaming, I'd rather learn how those fancy computers work in terms of software... and I did! I learned PHP, got into web development, got off PHP onto better languages. My parents weren't the most supportive, they didn't let me stare into my laptop for more than an hour a day. I had to save up pocket money to buy a dial-up access card (do people even remember those right now?) It all was fun and cool and a lot of still uncharted territory. When I was 15, I learned that being a developer can actually make you money , and not just some money, but pretty good money (I traveled on my own, with a friend, both without parents, when I was 16) Where were we at? Ah right, the regrets. Looking back, I wish I had spent my time more efficiently. That I started freelancing earlier. That I was planning for the longer term instead of just immediate gains. I'm almost 20 now, but it still makes me a bit sad from time to time, but one thing I realized is... You can't change the past, so the regretting is not getting you anywhere. If anything, it might only be holding you behind. Get over it and realize that, while you don't control the past, you do control the present (and therefore the future). Think bigger and focus on things that might not be rewarding immediately, but that will add up with time. Posting to a blog once a week seems anything but rewarding, but with time, your blog does become a pretty good marketer for yourself, it brings you in new contracts, and there are many more examples of the long-term thinking.

Hey Emil. Sorry, I can't seem to find how it relates to the Redux anti-pattern I've presented. I haven't used Vue.js either so I'm probably not the most qualified person to answer that... try posting this as a question on hashnode?

Create React App is a great way to start development, it provides quite a few sensible default that make the overall development experience classier. If you know webpack, it saves you time. If you aren't very comfortable configuring webpack, it saves you even more time. The best thing is, you can get out of CRA any time by ejecting. Don't be scared! What eject does is, it copies the webpack config and a few other config files from the create-react-app module right into your project. It's an escape hatch. So at this point, you don't have a create-react-app dependency anymore, you have a regular set of config files that you can customize at will — add some additional loaders or plugins, for one. The only thing you [obviously] loose is Create React App, which includes updates to it. (CRA also has a discussion at the moment about allowing some customizability without requiring to eject.) I have had a client recently bootstrap a project with CRA and immediately eject to customize it to their liking, which speaks volumes about the ease of getting started!