> No 4 year university will teach you React as part of a CS degree.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a frontend developer.
They will teach you why React is used though, at least indirectly. A good professor will explain the virtues and drawbacks of immutability, and explain how it affects performance; with this understanding, it will help you choose whether or not React or another framework is more appropriate.
> Point is, becoming a good developer is largely a self-taught discipline as is.
It can be, but to write code that ends up performing well, you typically have to have some underlying understanding of the "guts" of the libraries you're using.
Dumb example, to find the smallest element of a list, I used to sort the list, and grab the first element out of it. This will work, but if I had taken any data structures or algorithms class, I would have learned that this is an O(n log n) process, whereas finding the min only requires O(n). This won't matter for smaller lists, but for something big it absolutely will.
Now, maybe I'm just dumb, I'm willing to accept that, but it's not like when I realized this later and changed to the faster version, that the code for finding the min was appreciably shorter or prettier or easier to maintain, it was only faster.
I knew just fine how to search for something and copypaste from Stackoverflow; I just didn't even realize that the solution that I immediately thought of was sub-optimal.
Sure, that example maybe shouldn't necessitate a $50k degree, but my point was more that the theory inherently informs the practice. Taking a theoretic discrete math class does make your software better, even if it doesn't immediately seem relevant because all the job postings are asking for 10+ years of React experience or something.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a frontend developer.
They will teach you why React is used though, at least indirectly. A good professor will explain the virtues and drawbacks of immutability, and explain how it affects performance; with this understanding, it will help you choose whether or not React or another framework is more appropriate.
> Point is, becoming a good developer is largely a self-taught discipline as is.
It can be, but to write code that ends up performing well, you typically have to have some underlying understanding of the "guts" of the libraries you're using.
Dumb example, to find the smallest element of a list, I used to sort the list, and grab the first element out of it. This will work, but if I had taken any data structures or algorithms class, I would have learned that this is an O(n log n) process, whereas finding the min only requires O(n). This won't matter for smaller lists, but for something big it absolutely will.
Now, maybe I'm just dumb, I'm willing to accept that, but it's not like when I realized this later and changed to the faster version, that the code for finding the min was appreciably shorter or prettier or easier to maintain, it was only faster.