This was our second week of covering React and one of our final weeks of learning new content. We covered the stuff necessary in making more featureful Single-Page Applications, AJAX calls, conditional rendering, and the use of React Router. As this was the final week before we began working on our Final Projects, the homework this week was optional. I am really glad I choose take it on.
The previous week’s homework was considerably trivial use of React compared to this weeks. Going through the awesome Reactjs Docs, as a class, we pretty much covered everything that is in the Getting Started section. And it is pretty interesting that that is essentially it for React functionality.
Our optional homework project this week was create a React application that searches articles from New York Times, using their Search API. Users are able set search criteria, view search results, and save search results to a Mongo store. The tough part for me, was figuring out asynchronous calls and figuring out how to share data between components. Working through these issues really helped these concepts to stick, far more than going through examples in class.
Here is a link to the live version of the site, as well as the project on Github.
