He made the dev environment too much to set up and chose to work with Grunt as opposed to Gulp for a task runner. On top of that, it just felt like a really superficial explanation as to how React works, or D3 for that matter. It's more like a giant tutorial on how to build a histogram with React and D3. It's definitely not a book meant for complete beginners but at least I learned a few things about it and on how modular React can be as well as how to render some things with it. Unless you're already more familiar with D3 or React, this book is probably not a good start.