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about this book
I mention some topics in the book that are important but not part of Angular. You may
know nothing about some of these, but the book provides enough cursory knowledge
that you should be able to follow along:
¡TypeScript —Angular is written with TypeScript, and so are all the examples in this
book. If you’re new to TypeScript, I provide many hints along the way, but I sug-
gest you review the ofcial documentation at www.typescriptlang.org.
¡Reactive programming —Angular’s design often allows and recommends using
reactive-style programming, which is usually used in conjunction with the popu-
lar RxJS library. There’s a lot of great material out there for learning reactive and
RxJS, and I share a few links to it in the book.
How this book is organized
This book is divided into themed chapters, beginning with the core details of Angu-
lar and expanding into more complex themes. Chapters 1–3 lay the groundwork for
understanding what Angular is (and isn’t) and discuss its role in building your appli-
cations. These chapters also provide a quick but fairly comprehensive tutorial of many
of Angular’s key features. If you’re already familiar with Angular, you may nd these
sections easy to skim to nd new insights.
Chapters 4–5 act like a single unit on the topic of components. Angular (like HTML)
is based on the idea of building individual components that can be composed together
for more complex interactions. You can’t have an Angular application without com-
ponents, and I cover them in great detail in these chapters so you can focus on other
aspects in the remainder of the book.
Chapters 6–9 focus on key topics in building applications. Chapter 6 is all about ser-
vices and, subsequently, dependency injection. Understanding how to manage your
services is key to building a larger Angular application, and often key to using other
capabilities as well. Chapter 7 looks closely at the router and how to use it to create
simple to complex navigation patterns that are used in many web applications. Chapter
8 shows you how to build your own custom directives and pipes, which become crucial
when you expand the size of your application and want to make it easier to maintain.
Finally, chapter 9 covers the two different approaches to building forms with Angular, as
well as how to create your own custom form controls.
The last two chapters round off your Angular training with a focus on testing in chap-
ter 10 and on building and deploying your application for production in chapter 11.
You might build some small hobby websites without testing or production tooling, but
Angular provides some great tools that make it easy even for large enterprise applica-
tions to use. I suggest you use them too! The brief appendix discusses the transition
from AngularJS to Angular (or version 1.x to 2+).
If you’re brand new to Angular and want a guided tour, I recommend reading the
chapters in order. This approach will give you incremental knowledge to build on as
you go, as often a chapter glosses over details that were covered in an earlier one.