Over at the Tighten blog Samantha Geitz posted an amazing introduction to React. She starts off by clearly explaining how to setup the environment (webpack and a few dependencies). After making sure that it all works, she continues by building a GIF search engine. Along the way the core concepts of React are explained. If you're in any way interesting in learning React, I warmly recommend reading the entire piece.

React itself is reasonably well-documented and easy to pick up, once you can shift your thinking to align with its conventions. The problem is, if you want to build robust apps, the V in MVC probably isn't going to cut it, and you have to dive into the often-confusing ecosystem surrounding React.

In this series, we're going to walk through the stages of building a React application — an app that lets you search the Giphy API and displays results, similar to what Giphy has on its own website.

In this first article, we are going to build the application using only React (with Webpack for asset compilation).

http://blog.tighten.co/react-101-building-a-gif-search-engine

I'm looking forward to read the next articles of this series.