Learning Angular – Second Edition

Book Preface

We have come a long way since 2010, when AngularJS was first released. Internet wasn’t really made to be an application platform but one for rendering static pages. This has, of course, changed as developers have started treating it more and more as their main application platform. The promise of reaching billions of people has been too enticing. This meant that the web had to grow up. Different approaches have been tried during the years, such as JSP, GWT, Web Forms for .NET, and so on—approaches that have been more or less successful. What is clear is that when AngularJS showed up, it was greeted as a savior. It made it super easy for everyone to quickly create an application with JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and even use AJAX. It’s still a valid choice for building small to medium applications.

The easier something is to use, the more likely it is that people will treat it like ketchup and start adding more and more to it to and use it everywhere. AngularJS was never meant for large enterprise applications. The Internet progressed and more and more features became available in the browser. There was an idea of wanting to incorporate all these new features but also to ensure that AngularJS could be used for really large applications. A decision was taken that it would be easier to start over from scratch and create Angular, the successor of AngularJS. And so, on 14 September 2016, the release version of Angular saw the light of day. Since then major versions of Angular have been produced at a furious pace. We are now on version 5. This does not mean that Angular core concepts have changed, they have been retained. Certain breaking changes have been introduced along the way, but every major version has firstly corrected bugs, introduced new features, and really aimed at making Angular apps as fast as possible and their footprint as small as possible. This is a worthy goal to have in today’s mobile-first world.

This book aims to introduce the reader to all the major facets of Angular, and show you how to build small, medium, and, even, large applications. You don’t need much knowledge to get started with Angular applications, but there are many layers to it. As your app grows in size, you will want to care about making it prettier, faster, easier to maintain, and so on. This book is written with that in mind. Take your time reading this book. If you want to read a few chapters and build some apps, do it. If you want to jump straight into the more advanced features, then that is your prerogative. We hope you will enjoy reading this book as much as we enjoyed writing it