As mentioned earlier, although React itself is quite simple, the ecosystem around it can be a little overwhelming. Tessa Thorton, a former senior front-end developer for Shopify, once wrote a blog post titled How to learn web frameworks (ux.shopify.com/how-to-learn-web-frameworks-9d447cb71e68) In it, she reminded us that "Frameworks don’t exist to impress people or make your life harder. They exist to solve problems."

This reminds me of the first ever application I ever built, a clone of Amazon. It was built completely in vanilla JavaScript and PHP because I didn't even know there were frameworks available! However, there was a piece of animation I couldn't get right, and after Googling a lot (and finding the paradise that is Stack Overflow), I ended up using jQuery.

For learning how to program, this was not a bad strategy. It allowed me to understand what is possible without frameworks, and appreciate the framework more when I do use it.

Most tutorials will ask you to set up all the tools first, before explaining how to use them. We are going to take a different approach - we will build our page from scratch using the minimum set of tools, and introducing new concepts and tools only when needed.

In the following section, we will use this approach to build the Register page of our application.