Course Setup & React 19 Overview

[00:00:00]
>> Brian Holt: So my setup, I get asked this every time, so I just put a little note there. First of all, you will need Node installed for this class. I am using 2214, which I think as of writing is the most current LTS. In general, I just try and be on the latest LTS, that's just my MO.

[00:00:19]
Unless I have some reason to try and be on something later, they have some feature that I want to try out or something like that. But being on the latest LTS is just good practice. This should work on anything after 20.15 or 16, something like that. So if you're older than that, at least the Node M stuff probably won't work.

[00:00:37]
But you could just do .m if you really wanted to. But suffice to say, you should be on something later than 20.16. I use Fast Node Manager, I think that's what that stands for to manage my Node versions. It's basically an NVM, but any one of them works fine, I don't really care.

[00:00:53]
Volta would be fine as well. Let's go with 65% certain that everything in here would just work out of the box with Bun, but I have not tested that. So good luck, have fun, if that's your choice here. And I am about 50% confident that it won't work with Dino, if that's what your preference is as well, just cuz there's some stuff in there that I didn't try.

[00:01:19]
I'm using VS Code today. I used to work there, so I signed a blood contract with the devil that I have to continue using VS Code, so I wanna keep my soul. That being said, I frequently use Copilot and Cursor as well, awesome tools. But I think when you're learning something, some of those AI tools can kinda get in the way by like, do you want, do you mean this, do you mean this, right?

[00:01:39]
And it kind of spoils your train of thought. So I have turned off completions during this course, but generally I actually have completions on, but that's why. I use Firefox now more than ever. I try and support something anything other than Chromium, so that's why I'm on Firefox today and happen for some time.

[00:02:02]
And I just generally use terminal.app or the VS Code terminal. There's no real rhyme or reason there, it just works for what I need it for, so I continue using it. I'm on Dark+, it's installed, but not the default anymore. I used the MonaLisa font with ligatures installed.

[00:02:18]
So if you see some of my fonts combining together, that's a ligature. I'll show you when I get there. And then for my terminal, I use, yeah, and then Cascadia Code is also free if you don't wanna pay for MonaLisa. And then all the cool icons is VS Code icons.

[00:02:38]
My terminal is zsh, Dracula theme, Starship prompt. Let's just pull up my terminal here, cuz it might be useful to visualize this. So people always ask me, where does all this stuff come from? This comes from Starship.
>> Brian Holt: And then you have to have what's called a Nerd Font to make that work.

[00:02:57]
So the font is Cascadia Cove Nerd Font. So I left a bunch of links there, if you're interested, please feel free to click through. And then I've never had to put one of these in here, but I feel like the industry has moved so far towards AI that it's worthy to have a disclaimer of what is and isn't generated by AI in this course.

[00:03:15]
Just so you know what came from my brain and what came from the hive mind of GitHub. Every line of text in here was hand typed by me, so that you can be confident in that every line of code in the repos is written by me. The only actual code that exists in here that I actually used Claude to generate was just all the sample data, right?

[00:03:44]
I didn't wanna write 50 lines of SQLite to generate something into a code base. So I prompted Claude to come out with that. As well as all the SEO on this, because I just can't stand writing just summaries and keywords and AI is very good at that. So all of that was generated using AI, just generally my stance on AI.

[00:04:06]
I work on AI, neon is a very AI-enabled company. We power a lot of things like Replit and some of those other kind of AI Codegen agents. I'm continually impressed with the people that wield AI well and what they're able to get done. So I kinda have a double-edged kinda sword opinion on that.

[00:04:28]
It's powerful if you are experienced in the ways of the code that you're writing, and it's powerful when you know what you're doing with AI. And if both of those things are true, I'm really impressed with what people can do with it. But if you go into these things with a shallow understanding of them, then you're just bound to build really tall houses of cards that when something breaks, you're gonna have zero idea how to fix it, right?

[00:04:50]
Whereas if it ends up being someone that helps you write code that you were going to write anyway, then it's awesome. If it's an intern that's writing code for you that you don't understand, you get what you put into it, and it's kind of what my point there.

[00:05:05]
So do I use AI? Yes, it helps me work faster. It helps me write docs, emails, those kind of things. But yeah, it's like a manager reviewing their intern's code. You are responsible for what you ship. And if your intern ships bad code, it's because you let them ship bad code, same thing with AI, right?

[00:05:23]
So does that make sense, any questions, concerns, profanities? All those are welcome. A note about React 19, that's kind of what inspired me to do a complete intro to React v9, which actually was released when 18.3 was still out. Good news is I went through everything, 19 didn't break anything for complete intro to React v9, so we're all good there.

[00:05:52]
React 19 has been a long time coming. They kind of publicly tipped their hand a little bit that they were shipping it in late 2020 22 and they released it in 2025, so that's quite some time.
>> Brian Holt: But this is kind of how React tends to work. They tend to release all these features, they put them in kind of a canary release, and then they just run it on Facebook forever.

[00:06:16]
And once they're confident there, then they release it to everybody. That's what they've been doing for a long time. 19 just took a really long time for them to get out just because I guess moving parts and a lot more opinions that they were kind of baking into this kind of relatively unopinionated framework.

[00:06:34]
So all this to say is React 19 shipped recently, depending on when you're watching this course. But recently, for as of writing for this, but it was actually piloted for two years before that, which is say, it's pretty stable. So even though it's really new, the stuff that you're working on has been pretty well battle tested at Facebook's and React or at Netflix and those kind of places for a long time.

[00:07:01]
Primarily, we're gonna concern ourselves with React server components. That's the big thing that 19 came out with, but I'll try and talk about all the interesting things that are recent with React. So, yeah, the complete intro course, did cover some of the minor features of version 19. It talks about React compiler, which I don't talk about in here.

[00:07:20]
So all those things I covered at the end of a complete intro v9. So if you want more on that, please just pop back over there and check it out.