<ChrisGeirman />

This is not going to be a thorough nor particularly thoughtful review. Sorry. This is going to be a quick recollection of my thoughts based on a few notes I scribbled to myself as I read the book Learning React Native by Bonnie Eisenman (@brindelle).

Overall, I thought the book was really well done and a worthwhile read. I’ve been working in React Native since April 2015 (v0.4.0), so I wouldn’t consider myself a noob anymore, however I’m far from an expert either. I felt this book did a great job of introducing the beginner to the platform while also adding enough value to make it a good use of time for the intermediate react native developer.

I particularly loved that she addressed both iOS and Android together, which makes it easy to compare/contrast in the same context. Very helpful, and insightful to me since I’ve done very little with Android so far.

She does a deep(ish) dive into Gesture and Pan Responder which I’d consider a more advanced topic. This section was illuminating and felt thorough, which left me realizing I’ve got a long way to go before I’ll have achieved a mastery of this topic. Helpful here would been to introduce some real world use cases + example solutions that take into account each of the various callbacks (e.g. when would onResponderReject be useful, and how to properly use?)

I felt she could have done a more thorough job of walking us through the code samples in some places, but other than that I ultimately walked away feeling like reading this book was a good use of my time.