Welcome to React in a Week
A free, hands-on course that takes you from zero to a deployed React app in seven days.
This course is for people who have never written React. You don't need to know much JavaScript either; Day 1 covers what you need. All you need is a computer, a browser, and a few focused hours each day.
You learn by doing. Every lesson has live code you can edit, a challenge, and a short quiz. Over the week you'll build one app, a Reading List for tracking the books you want to read, are reading, and have finished. It starts as two hard-coded cards and ends as a typed, tested Next.js app with its own URL.
The plan
| Day | Topic | You'll build |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | Setup | A React app running on your machine |
| 1 | JavaScript essentials → your first component | A static BookCard |
| 2 | Describing the UI: props, lists, purity | A BookList rendered from data |
| 3 | Interactivity: events, state, forms | Add, edit and delete books |
| 4 | Managing state & escape hatches | Filters, a reducer, persistence |
| 5 | Scaling up with TypeScript | Routes, shared state, server data |
| 6 | Modern React 19 | Optimistic forms, transitions, tests |
| 7 | Production with Next.js | Your app, deployed |
Plan for about 4–5 hours a day. If you need more time, spread the course over two weeks; it's about the learning, not the deadline.
How to use this course
Read with your hands on the keyboard. When you see a live code box, change something and watch the preview. If you break it, press Reset.
Try the challenge before opening the solution. Getting stuck for a few minutes is part of how you learn.
Mark each lesson complete at the bottom of the page. Your progress is saved in this browser and shown on the home page.
Build the checkpoint project at the end of each day in your own editor. Seeing it work on your own machine is what makes it stick.
Why this order?
The course follows the order of the official react.dev Learn docs and borrows teaching ideas from The Joy of React, Epic React, and Full Stack Open. The Sources page explains how each guide shaped the course.