Introduction

Angular is a web framework that helps you build web, mobile web, native mobile, and desktop applications. Angular apps are authored in TypeScript, compiled to JavaScript, and run in browser-based runtimes that have become fast and efficient over the last decade.

Like Struts in the early 2000s and Rails in the mid-2000s, Angular and other JavaScript frameworks have changed the way developers write applications. Today, data is exposed via REST APIs, and UIs are written in JavaScript (or TypeScript).

As a Java web developer, I was immediately attracted to AngularJS when I saw its separation of concerns: controllers, services, and directives for data manipulation. Then along came Angular 2.0 in 2016, and changed everything. The team adopted TypeScript as Angular’s default language, refined its architecture for the future, and created awesome tools like the Angular CLI.

It worked! The Angular project is still going strong five years later.

The Angular team releases a major version every six months, often with backward compatibility, making for a thriving and enthusiastic open source community. Want to make your users happy? Just make it easy to upgrade!

An Angular app is composed of several building blocks:

  • Components: Classes that retrieve data from services and expose it to templates.

  • Services: Classes that make HTTP calls to an API.

  • Templates: HTML pages that display data from components.

  • Pipes: Data-transformation tools (e.g., format dates, currency, etc.).

  • Directives: HTML processors that simplify logic in templates. Similar to JSP tags.

This book shows you how to build apps with Angular and guides you through many tools, techniques, security best practices, and production deployment options.

I hope you learn something from it! 😃