2023 Course Review | Advanced React from Meta frontend certificate on Coursera

I took the course in 2023, do I recommand it?

Pro:

• It has many Coursera Code Lab sessions. This is an online VS code editor. I love this feature. It means that you do not need to install VS code or any package to finish the coding exercises.
• The quizzes make me think. The graded quizzes questions are not no brainers, sometimes they really help me gain a deeper understanding of React.
  I recreated one quiz question in Code sandbox as an example.
  Read the code => reason through what is logged when we click on the button

• The topics are indeed advanced. The part I personally most interested: different ways to encapsulate components to make them reusable, including custom hooks, higher-order components (HOC) and render prop.
• In case you are worried that this course is no longer state-of-art, it teaches function components, not class components. :)

Cons:

• The coursera Code Lab does not have auto-grader. I was hoping that the coding exercises would be checked by some automated testing, but it is not. As long as you have opened the code lab once, Coursera will recognize this exercice as “finished” and mark it green.
• The Code Lab is sometimes buggy. When working on the final project, my preview sites keep showing “Module not found” error that I have no clue about. After downloading the code and run it on my local machine, the error simply disappeared.
• Some topics are no longer the “recommanded way” by React official documents, especially the contents in Week 3. Nevertheless it is good to at least understand how these apis work. When I encouter code lab for such topics, I would try to use the alternatives such as custom hooks to solve the code lab.

Example 1: Higher Order components.

Example 2: React.cloneElement. This is now a legacy api in the newest version of React official documentation.

Example 3: React.Children. Again, this is now a legacy api.