Starting Over

I don't know how many people will read this, but I hope it may be useful to someone.

First of all, I had to ditch both Zorin OS and React Native. I ditched React Native because I don't think mobile apps is really where I want to go. Maybe I'm old school (heads up: it's my 42nd birthday today) so I prefer websites, generally speaking, although it's an increasingly grey area.

I ditched Zorin OS because I had to ditch the laptop it was on. I put Zorin on it because it didn't seem capable of handling Windows 10, despite its hardware specs. Advice here: don't by stock laptops from places like Currys PC World (that's in the UK). They're in such places and at least relatively cheap for a reason. After making do with a Chromebook whilst I was still working in infrastructure / IT support, I finally shelled out about £1K for a gaming laptop. It's maybe not as high spec as a developer laptop, but it's kind of the best of both worlds (specs vs price).

Finally, then, I'm getting back to React.

But I'm also learning Vue. These two JavaScript...I still can't remember whether one is a framework or a library or they're both one or the other. As far as I'm concerned, at this point, it doesn't matter. But everyone is using them.

Do I have a preference? To be honest, I would probably say Vue. I suspect it's not quite as powerful, but it's much easier to learn; more intuitive somehow.

That said, React really is "where it's at". And I'm delighted to report that Hitesh Choudhary has a new YouTube series on React. It's suitable for beginners and it's project-based. I've stacked up a whole bunch of Udemy courses and curated YouTube playlists, but I suspect they're for adding finesse and knowledge. It may be different for you, but I've come to understand and believe that the best way to learn a programming language is to use it, not learn ABOUT it.

If you've learned any of the basics about React already, you can probably skip straight to video 3, Create React Projects. The first one is a series overview, and the second one is a bit of background on React itself, plus a learning roadmap.

I think that's all for now. I hope something here may be helpful to you.