Introduction

[00:00:00]
>> Kadi Kraman: Hello and welcome to this introductory course to React Native. If you're new to React Native or you've just tried a little bit or you're just getting started, I'm honestly, I'm so excited for you. I love building mobile apps and the first time you actually see something that you built in JavaScript in React or in your own phone and actually interact with the components.

[00:00:24]
It's incredibly satisfying and rewarding, and yeah, let's get started doing that. So this course is going to be an introduction to React Native. So you don't need to know anything about React Native already. If you're familiar with JavaScript and TypeScript, that is very much preferred. And knowledge of React is desirable but is not essential.

[00:00:52]
So in this course, we're very much going to learn by doing. We're going to start completely from scratch and we're going to cover the fundamentals of building mobile apps with React Native. So the primary components are use interact with, and we'll highlight the subtle and then not so subtle ways that mobile development is different from web development.

[00:01:16]
So hi, my name is Kadi, I'm your instructor. I've actually been fortunate enough to stumble onto React Native really early on, and I was hooked. And I've been building React Native develops ever since. I've worked on loads of interesting things, I guess one of the notable things was that I was the tech lead on the PU map.

[00:01:38]
Aside from consultancy work, I've also been active in direct community. I've done several conference talks. I've linked to a couple of the more recent and more interesting ones in this course page. I've also spearheaded building the React Conf app for React Conf in 2024, which you can find in Google Play and App Store.

[00:01:56]
And this was actually an example app that was built specifically to have an end-to-end, in-production example of what it's like to build React Native apps with Expo and go to production. So you can actually see it on the app stores and the code is available on GitHub. I'm currently working at Expo and hoping to bring more people into the amazing world of building mobile apps in React Native.

[00:02:23]
So for this workshop, what you'll need to follow along is a computer. So a Mac, Windows, or Linux, all are fine. And you'll need to have Node.js ideally installed already. And the second thing you need is a phone. So an iPhone or an Android phone,and internet connection.
>> Kadi Kraman: In this course, we're going to be learning by doing.

[00:02:46]
So all we're going to do is we're going to build a little utility app completely from scratch. So we're gonna start from the blank template. And I'm going to introduce various concepts and point out common patterns in React Native development as we go on. This app is gonna have two main features.

[00:03:01]
We're gonna have a shopping list. It's gonna be a fancy shopping list, and a reminder. I'm also gonna add a third screen, and this is gonna be intentionally left blank. So it's gonna be for you to fill out with something that you would like as a utility app for yourself.

[00:03:17]
So have a think of what you'd like to build and hopefully the skills in this workshop are going to get you there. And just as a bit of housekeeping, I've had this course website and all the material that I'm going to cover is available on this course. I'm probably gonna say more things live than I've written down, but all the code is going to be here.

[00:03:38]
In general, all the commands that you need to execute In your terminal are going to be displayed in these code blocks. And any code that we're going to write is going to be in these collapsible elements. So these will be either for new files or write the whole file, or it will be a diff of what's changed.

[00:03:58]
And at the end of each section If we've added any code, I'm also going to have a checkpoint. So it's gonna be this blue checkpoint with a link to the course solutions repository. And this will link to the commit. So if you go to the git commit history, this will have a commit for every step that we're going to do in the workshop.

[00:04:19]
So you can refer back to this to check your work. I might also add a couple of these annotations for tips or warnings. So a tip is just something useful related to the topic that we're discussing. And then this warning is usually either a warning against a common anti-pattern or a common mistake, or just a tip offering debug advice.

[00:04:50]
I think that's it for the intro. And I hope you'll enjoy the course.