If you want to build a front end application that consumes third party APIs you'll generally need to send those requests from a server to get around CORS. It doesn't necessarily need to be Node but it is lightweight and simple to set up as an API proxy.

I agree with Sandeep; the order he offers goes from simple to more complex for building larger applications. I was lucky enough to learn React and the associated tooling bit by bit as Flux, Babel, React Router and Redux were not yet available. As they became prominent I picked them up one at a time and in the said order. I believe this gave me an extremely solid foundation and recommend doing the same rather than becoming overwhelmed and frustrated by trying to learn it all at once .