React-designer, using webworkers to make React faster, and you're missing the point of React
Recently React split the library up a little bit, and created two main parts, React and ReactDOM. React handles virtual DOM calculations, while ReactDOM does the actual interfacing with the browsers DOM. Parashuram's blog post exposes a way to increase Reacts speed by moving React Virtual DOM calculations from the main UI thread of the browser, into a web worker.
Often when people talk about React you hear things like Virtual DOM! Server-side rendering! Custom event handling!
While these things are good, they're not necessarily the things that make React a winner in the web world. Dan Abramov lends us some insight on what really makes React special.
In life it is easy to find yourself surrounded by people who think the same way you do, and like the same things you like. If you're not careful you might end up in a vacuum of influence leading to mental stagnation. If you like React Gant probably agrees with you, but that doesn't mean it's all puppy dogs and rainbows. This article of his speaks to some downsides of the React Native developer experience.
The web is inundated with learning resources, especially for popular web frameworks, like React. The amount of minutia out there is staggering. Sometimes we just want to see some code examples! Martin Angelov of Tutorialzine has provided us with just that, practical code examples of React.
When speaking of React, we are often talking more about the React ecosystem than React by itself. This is because React alone is a relatively small piece of making web apps. When trying to dive into React, it can be overwhelming to learn React and JSX and Flux and ES* and Webpack. James K Nelson gives us a good introduction into using React sans the rest.
React's unenforced concepts and minimalistic approach can leave a beginner at a loss when it comes to learning the ropes. Do you learn Webpack? Babel? JSX?
If you're starting from scratch Sharif's tutorial is the place to go. He starts pre-React, to lend understanding of Facebook's motivation for creating React in the first place.
React Native is an awesome way to build native apps, since you can use React and all of it's goodness (like redux) to build real native apps. Deco is building an IDE to facilitate React Native development and it looks like it has a lot of really cool features, like React Native module installation, and a GUI for style updates.
If you're using Flux for anything, and not using Redux, you should strongly consider it. It's functional, declarative, and really really really simple.
Yuri Takhteyev spoke at the Toronto JavaScript meetup last week and gave a really great introduction to redux and its underlying principles.