Egghead courses review: React, reactive programming & open source

Most courses are good but very basic. They are very good to get to know a new technology. Only the Redux course I can recommend to any developer: no matter if you just starting with Redux, already fluent or not going to use it at all.

Some courses are free but most of them are available only by subscription. With a subscription you have access to all Egghead’s courses and a few useful features: adjusting playback speed, skip 25 seconds button, downloading HD videos. In the past they had a $20 monthly subscription but now they have only $200 yearly. And I can’t recommend it anymore: one month is enough to watch most of the good courses.

#Getting started with Redux by Dan Abramov (free)

Really great course. Teaches you many other things besides Redux: like ECMAScript 2015 and just how to write good code. Watch in any case.

#Building React applications with idiomatic Redux by Dan Abramov (free)

Not as universal as the first one but also very good. Watch if you’re already using Redux.

#How to contribute to an open source project on GitHub by Kent C. Dodds (free)

Very short and good course. Watch before you send your first 20 pull requests.

If you want more pull request to your open source projects, you can try to add a badge with the link to this course.

#How to write an open source JavaScript library by Kent C. Dodds (free)

Great course for beginners but I’ve learned something from it myself. Watch before you make your first 10 open source projects.

One thing I don’t like about this course: Kent suggests semantic-release to automate releases. I wouldn’t recommend it because it makes project maintainer life harder: it doesn’t allow you to group breaking changes and write human readable changelogs. And I think it’s too opinionated for such course.

#Learn how to use Immutable.js by J.S. Leonard

Mostly just retelling of the docs (which are hard to read). Watch if you don’t know much about Immutable.js.

#React testing cookbook by Trevor Miller

Short and very basic. Covers shallow rendering, expect-jsx and Redux.

#React: Flux architecture (ECMAScript 2015) by Joe Maddalone

Watch the first Redux course instead. Watch this course only if you really have to use the vanilla Flux.

#Reduce data with JavaScript Array#reduce by Joe Maddalone

I enjoyed watching this short course. Watch if you can’t use the reduce function with your eyes closed.

#Getting started with React Router by Joe Maddalone

Very basic and very short course. If you’re already using React Router in a project you most probably won’t learn anything new.

#React fundamentals by Joe Maddalone

Watch the free React fundamentals course by Tyler McGinnis instead (yeah, the name is the same but it’s a different course by a different author).

#Introduction to Reactive Programming by André Staltz

Looks like the example project is not very good to learn reactive programming. The resulting code looks for me like a typical jQuery soup. Watch the next course instead.

#Step-by-Step async JavaScript with RxJS by John Lindquist

This course is much better than the previous one. But it’s still not very useful to understand when to use reactive programming in real projects. Watch to see how reactive programming with RxJS looks like.

#React Native fundamentals by Tyler McGinnis

I didn’t know much about React Native and wanted to know how it looks. This course was good for that. Through the course the author develops an app for displaying GitHub profiles so in the end you have an idea of how to make an app with React Native.