A Beginner's Guide to Building React Projects

Welcome, if you're interested in becoming proficient in React, building projects can be a great way to achieve that.

I've compiled a list of eight different projects that not only showcase what you can create with React but also provide some ideas for apps you can build. Moreover, I'll equip you with all the necessary tools to build each project effectively.

Shall we begin?

First up, we have the Todo App. If you're new to building projects, this is an excellent starting point. A todo app is a simple application that allows you to create, read, update, and delete tasks (or "todos") easily.

The good thing about building a todo app is that it's quick and easy to create, and you can customize it to suit your needs. Plus, it's a great test of your React proficiency if you can build one without any guidance. Many popular apps that we use daily have some form of "todo" functionality, so this project will be an excellent foundation for your future React projects.

If you're new to programming and want to start a project, a great option is building a to-do app. The best part is that you don't need any external libraries to make one! You can customize it to be as simple or complex as you like, and add features like authentication or a database.

Once you've built a to-do app, the next step up is creating a personal blog. You can use Markdown to write your content, or fetch it from a CMS like Sanity or Contentful. For this project, you can use Next.js or Gatsby as your framework, and remark or mdx-js/mdx to convert your Markdown content into HTML.

After that, you can create an e-commerce app. This is similar to the blog project, but it requires a server for processing transactions. You can use Stripe to handle payments, and set up a webhook to receive event notifications. You can use Next.js to create an API route for server-side processing, or skip the server-side code entirely and use Stripe checkout or a payment link.

If you want to take it up a notch, you can create a news or community app like Reddit. This involves saving data to a database and allowing users to add comments and likes. You can use Firebase for this project, which provides Firestore for the database and Firebase Auth for authentication. You can use any React framework and React Router to create dynamic routes.

Finally, you can create a chat app like Discord that displays messages in real-time. This is an extension of the Reddit project, but with added functionality for real-time messaging.