Programming with Mosh — React Native for Beginners

A single two-hour video, published in May 2020, since watched more than three and a half million times. It is one of the most-watched free React Native tutorials on YouTube, and both halves of that sentence matter: the teaching is genuinely good, and it is genuinely six years old.

Mosh Hamedani's method is to explain an idea, demonstrate it, and only then type. Sentences are short. The editor font is large. Terms get repeated rather than swapped for synonyms, which makes this an unusually good pick if English is not your first language. Nobody here is going to move faster than you can follow.

How the two hours are spent

• The first 45 minutes are environment. Expo, running on an iOS simulator, an Android emulator and a physical device, then logging, debugging with Chrome, debugging in VS Code, and publishing.
• The middle hour is the component vocabulary. View, Text, Image, Touchables, Button, Alert, StyleSheet, and platform-specific code.
• Then 25 minutes on layout - Dimensions, orientation changes, and a careful chapter-by-chapter tour of Flexbox: flexDirection, justifyContent, alignItems, alignSelf, flexWrap, alignContent, the flexBasis/flexGrow/flexShrink trio, and absolute positioning.
• The last 20 minutes build two screens - a Welcome Screen and a View Image Screen - followed by a refactoring pass.

The age problem, specifically

The Flexbox and component teaching has not aged at all; those APIs are unchanged today. Almost everything in that first 45 minutes has aged badly. The Expo workflow shown here predates Expo Router, EAS Build and the modern development-build story, and the debugging section - remote JS debugging through Chrome, plus the VS Code setup that depended on it - describes a workflow React Native has since retired in favour of Hermes and its own debugger. Follow those chapters literally and you will hit commands that no longer exist.

The practical way to use this video is to jump to 0:46:30, where the fundamental concepts begin, and get your project running from the current Expo documentation instead. You lose nothing worth having.

Where it stops

Two hours buys components and layout. It does not buy navigation between screens, data fetching, forms, authentication or persistence - which is to say it does not buy an app, despite the title. That is by design: the video is the opening section of Mosh's paid Ultimate React Native series and it ends precisely where the paid material starts. The free portion stands up on its own terms, but know the shape of it before you begin.

Who it's for

Complete mobile beginners who already write JavaScript and want the concepts introduced slowly and in order. Skip it if you already know React well - you will spend a long stretch on ground you have covered, and the ending will annoy you. Skip it too if you want a finished project; take the Net Ninja's 29-part series or a longer freeCodeCamp course instead.

Our take

Watch it for the layout chapters, which remain among the clearest explanations of React Native Flexbox anywhere, free or paid. Do not watch it for setup. Treat it as a two-hour conceptual primer with a stale first act, and pair it with something recorded in the last year for anything you actually intend to run.