Advice/Suggestions on taking the React Native Courses

React Native
1

To make the most out of my monthly codewithmosh subscription I’ve decided to try the React Native course, but during the initial Expo installation lesson I’ve noticed that the course is 3-4 years old and the APIs and CLI seemed to have changed significantly since then. The mobile app Expo Client has also been replaced with Expo Go (or maybe just renamed).

I guess what I’m looking for is advice from those who currently do (or are familiar with) React Native / Expo development. Is it worth taking this course, or should I just learn on my own?

I have no problem taking the course if the meat of the content and development paradigms are largely the same and only requires me to read the docs and make a few API/CLI changes. But if there’s been a major paradigm shift it how Expo development works it might be better to just learn on my own.

For example, imagine if I were thinking of taking a beginner React course that was written pre-hooks (class components & lifecycle methods). It would be so outmoded at this point that I’d be better off learning the hooks-first approach on my own or elsewhere.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

2

So far so good. I haven’t gotten to the meat of the course yet, but I’ve got a test app running on my device and an Android emulator. There are certainly some differences, but so far nothing that’s been a blocker.

3

Expo debugging seems to be pretty broken. I haven’t been able to get it working in vscode at all using either the React Native Tools or the Expo Tools plugins (I followed their docs). Most breakpoints I set were marked as “detached”, but the one line that did allow setting a breakpoint crashed the debugger and the app on the phone when it tried to halt.

The only way I have been able to get the debugger to halt was to insert a debugger; line in the code and then clicking the the Open in JS Debugger option in the Expo Go menu (breakpoints had no effect). And even though it halts, hovering to inspect state is broken, so I have to use the scope trees or Watch on right side panel. Based on my web searches, it seems to be broken for many folks. One person said they’d moved to log statements for debugging long ago because of this. Pretty bad DX. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯