I’m in the midst of the the Redux lessons, and I’m struggling with something I haven’t dealt with before on this site… “why”?
I understand Redux manages state, and I understand in complex sites you can get into a situation where state has been mutated in an unexpected manner, but I don’t understand why it’s the next most important thing to learn about when building a front-end? To put an analogy to it, I feel like I’m being asked to carry water up a hill, and put it in a barrel with no understanding what the barrel will be used for. Yes, the tasks are simple, but they don’t relate to anything to me.
I’m sorry if this comes off as a bit rambling, but I think it reflects my mental state in these lessons. As I mentioned, I haven’t had this problem so far anywhere else in the curriculum, because everything is clearly building on prior information - this just feels very “out of left field”. Maybe a more accurate way to put it is that I feel like I lost a lot of momentum that I had accumulated in progressing through the earlier parts of the curriculum. Is there something I’m missing?
Unfortunately, the redux lessons are out of date. The team is currently revamping the curriculum but for now I would suggest learning about redux elsewhere.
It’s not necessarily that redux is the most important thing to learn but rather state management libraries in general.
Redux has been around for a while and its stable but there are also other options like Zustand. You also have options like React context.
Personally, I think you will learn more by building larger projects and using Redux to understand how it better works. Understanding the concepts and the connections will be stronger through a project then lessons IMO.
I appreciate that heads up My not-real-OCD makes me want to complete it for the certification, but knowing it’s not necessarily an important aspect right now is definitely re-assuring. Are all the React projects at the end of the Front End Dev Libs curriculum dependent on using Redux? If so, I suppose I’ll just move on to the next thing.
You can do all of them without redux and just manage state locally or react context.
I would argue that for most of the projects using redux would be overkill.
I would advise people if they really wanted to use redux in any of the projects to use it for the last two. Some people want to use it just for practice. But I think you will get better practice with Redux out of larger projects personally.
Really appreciate your guidance @jwilkins.oboe. I’ll start in on those projects. I have much larger projects for myself but I keep running into walls of ignorance, and this is so far the best place to learn the answers.
I would suggest making sure you understand how Reacts own state management works, including hooks (which isn’t taught in the curriculum) well before diving into Redux or any other state management libs. It is easier to see the benefits of state management libs after you have seen the “issues” they try to solve.
I think learning about useReducer and context before Redux is a good idea as they are simpler but similar in concept (at least superficially).
If you want to learn Redux, I would look at Redux Toolkit.
My not-real-OCD makes me want to complete it for the certification, but knowing it’s not necessarily an important aspect right now is definitely re-assuring. Are all the React projects at the end of the Front End Dev Libs curriculum dependent on using Redux? If so, I suppose I’ll just move on to the next thing.