Could be just me trying to cut corners but I found that the introduction of async actions seemed to make the tutorial take quite a bit more time to understand and as a complete beginner to react/redux I wanted to skip async actions and first understand how regular actions and react work.
However because the final project tying everything together with React uses async actions. I was compelled to go back to the async actions section. Its not a big deal, you explained it well and i understood it, it just felt it would be better as an optional section and wonder if there is a specific reason you introduced it that maybe as a beginner isn't obvious to me.
Thanks for the great tut!