I'd recommend trying out create-react-app if you want to learn React without having to worry about all the build tooling craziness. Eventually you'll have to start fighting with those if you build some real life stuff, but create-react-app is great for just getting up and running so you can learn the actual library (the fun stuff) first.
Wow, thanks for the link list! Will definitely take a look. Also create-react-app looks like exactly what I was looking for, very bare and to-the-point.
This was my first exposure too. Once you're ready to build an app with JSX (probably right after you finish that tutorial and realize that typing React.createElement all over will get painful), check out the new tool Create React App[0] by Dan Abramov and the folks at Facebook. It's an official generator that'll get you going with no build to set up, and a bare minimum of necessary code, basically one step above Hello World.
I'm working on a book about learning React by itself, without Redux and Webpack and all the other tools that distract from learning the basics. Hope to have it out in the next week or so.
If you are looking to build a web application, create-react-app is a great way to get started if you're willing to learn React. It's an open source project from facebook. Here is the link the github: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app. It's good quick start to building the front end of an application.
I think create-react-app is much more beginner friendly. Fewer concepts to learn. Rolling your own or using script tags to begin with is also an option (see this course for an example: https://egghead.io/courses/the-beginner-s-guide-to-react)
Is there a great mid-size open-source project that was created with Create React App? Any input on UI frameworks? I'm currently using React-Bootstrap, but I'm thinking about using Material-UI.
There’s an O’Reilly book called Learning React (2nd Edition) which is great. It brings you up to speed on the history of the framework as well.
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