Learn React — Scrimba

Scrimba's format is the pitch. A scrim looks like a video, but it isn't one — the recording is the instructor's actual editor, so at any moment you can pause, click into the code, change it, and run it. No cloning a repo, no switching windows, no falling three files behind. Once you've used it, ordinary screencasts feel oddly passive.

Bob Ziroll teaches this one, and he's been teaching React on Scrimba long enough to have rebuilt it more than once as the library changed. Listings put the current version around eleven hours across roughly 140 parts, with somewhere north of 170 interactive challenges — the challenges are the actual product, the talking is the glue between them.

What you build

It's organised into sections that each end in a solo project. Static pages come first and finish with a digital business card. Data-driven React follows, with an AirBnB Experiences clone and a travel journal. Then state, where you build Ziroll's meme generator, a Chef Claude recipe app that pulls apart props versus state, a notes app, the dice game Tenzies, and a quiz app to close.

Six projects is a lot for a free course, and they're small enough to finish, which matters more than being impressive.

How the scrim format actually feels

Excellent for the first few hours and quietly limiting later. Because you're always editing inside Scrimba's environment, you never set up a real project, never fight a build tool, never resolve a dependency. That's the point early on and a gap later — plenty of people finish this course and then can't start a React app on their own machine.

The other thing to watch is what's free. The course material has historically been free to work through, but Scrimba has restructured its offering repeatedly, and career-path content, certificates and some solo-project reviews sit behind a Pro subscription. Check what's gated on the day you sign up rather than trusting any listing, including this one.

Who it's for — and who should skip it

Very strong if you know JavaScript, learn by doing, and lose focus watching passive video. The challenge cadence — explain, then immediately make you type — is the best defence against tutorial-following-without-learning that we've seen.

Skip it if you'd rather read; eleven hours of talking is slow if you absorb text faster. Skip it too if you're already comfortable in React and just want to fill gaps, since the pacing is firmly beginner.

Our take

The best free interactive React course going, held back by the sandbox that makes it good. Budget an afternoon after finishing it to set up a Vite project locally and rebuild one of the projects from nothing — otherwise you'll have learned React and not learned how to start.