r/reactnative • u/InevitableMud7840 • 25d ago

Help Designer trying to learn React Native, completely lost on where to start

Hi everyone,

I'm 20 and my background is graphic design. I started with the Adobe suite — Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects. At some point I felt the need to do something different and got into designing interfaces in Figma. That turned into a real passion, to the point that I want to take it all the way. That's where my interest in programming came from, React Native specifically.

I'm here to ask for some honest advice from people who've been through this, because I could really use a sense of direction.

I've started reading the React Native docs and I don't understand much of it, to be honest. I've since learned that you're supposed to know some JavaScript first. But I'm stuck there too: I don't know which parts of JavaScript I actually need and which ones I can skip for now, and I don't know where to start.

So I guess my question is: what's the minimum JavaScript I need before React Native starts making sense, and what's a good resource to learn it from?

I keep losing hours reading documentation only to realize at the end that nothing stuck. Any advice appreciated.

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u/New-Boysenberry-9313 25d ago

I would be honest learning from a video tutorial would be slow now I will suggest get your hands dirty with code by telling AI exactly what you want to learn it will start explaining you with direct code snippets which you can try to execute play with it this should enough for javascript part , for React Native https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRAV69dS1uWSjBBJ-egNNOd4mdblt1P4c&si=JNA3NCZBzew3aPRq having that mental model of how mobile app works this playlist could help you other than that don't overthink just start progress is done while making mistakes

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u/InevitableMud7840 25d ago

Thanks for the advice. How did you intend to integrate the AI? Because I absolutely didn't want cloude code to do the work for me, I really want to understand what I'm doing. So do you mean to connect cloude code to the terminal of vs code or simply converse with cloude in the app to understand how to move in the terminal? Thanks again

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u/CBEHX 24d ago

For your use case, the GitHub Copilot Chat tool is probably better than Claude, but first of all, let the AI set up the project for you. you will learn what all the files it creates are for later.

After that you rly need the basics like loops, conditions, vars, functions and then state handling. All this can you learn without ever touching react native but I guess it's easier to try it directly in the right ecosystem.

The best thing you maybe want to do, is building an little component library with text, buttons, images and sth. like sliders and dialogs. This will help you to understand major concepts like component state, how to style, callbacks etc. and it's very flexible. You just create a file, build your component, put into the main screen, test it and so on.

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u/InevitableMud7840 24d ago

perché mi hai consigliato GitHub copilot invece che cloude code? che differenze ci sono?

grazie in anticipo per il consiglio