> You need to understand why you need Webpack, why you need babel, what problems they solve, the reason they're now part of your toolchain.
I feel this is applicable here:
> > First, you can generally divide learners into two categories. There's a smaller group of people who feel the need to understand every abstraction and bit of tooling that they're using before they feel comfortable using all of those to build something. The larger group just wants to learn the actual tool or library at hand.
You say "you _need_ to understand why you need Webpack/Babel", but that isn't the case.
People learn in different ways. I learned React using CRA, because you get an immediately productive React environment. Later on I learned what Webpack and Babel were for.
If you forced me to learn Babel and Webpack first, while all I wanted to do was check out the React buzz, I would have been turned off immediately.
But the point is you did end up learning it. I didn't claim you need to understand them before you understand React... however, you also don't need them yet when you are learning react. You can use React just fine without them; it gets cumbersome, but by that point, it's time to learn about the toolchain - which is the ideal point to learn about it: you are now facing the problems they are solving.
I feel this is applicable here:
> > First, you can generally divide learners into two categories. There's a smaller group of people who feel the need to understand every abstraction and bit of tooling that they're using before they feel comfortable using all of those to build something. The larger group just wants to learn the actual tool or library at hand.
You say "you _need_ to understand why you need Webpack/Babel", but that isn't the case.
People learn in different ways. I learned React using CRA, because you get an immediately productive React environment. Later on I learned what Webpack and Babel were for.
If you forced me to learn Babel and Webpack first, while all I wanted to do was check out the React buzz, I would have been turned off immediately.