[gingerbread-man]

Books are great for learning the more academic aspects of programming-- when you're trying to wrap your mind around an unfamiliar concept, a high-quality explanation can be really helpful. When you're trying to pick up a new framework, though, the bigger challenge is usually figuring out where all of the controls are. The best (only?) way to do that is by building a simple project, and looking up what you don't know along the way. I'd advise staying clear of all of the other other popular tools in the React ecosystem (Redux, Immutable, etc...) until you've worked through the basics of how React works on its own. Learn to write messy React code first, then learn the idioms.