Angular in Action is designed to help you learn how to use Angular in building your own web applications. I’ve brought the core lessons from my own experiences into this book. I’ve built a number of large enterprise applications on Angular and many smaller ones as well. I believe similar best practices go into most well-written applications no matter their size, so I share those as well.

My goal is to ensure you have a strong foundation in how Angular works, how it’s used to build web applications, and how to then ship those into production. This foundational knowledge will enable you to learn additional concepts more quickly and easily (often by reviewing the documentation or even blog posts).

There are certainly more Angular topics than could be covered in a single book, as Angular is an ambitious and comprehensive set of tools and libraries. I took great care to make this a book that works on multiple levels. You may find some topics to be more advanced than you need right now, but you can always come back to them later. Or you may find that the basics are familiar but the more advanced topics help fill in the gaps.

Who should read this book

Although I believe Angular is accessible for developers, this book is targeted at readers who have the subject knowledge detailed in the following list. Other readers will certainly find value in the content, but may have knowledge gaps that aren’t covered specifically:

• Web applications —You understand the role of web applications and have a little bit of experience with building them.
• JavaScript —You have enough knowledge of JavaScript and its syntax to be able to follow along with the examples.
• HTML/CSS —You understand the roles of HTML and CSS, as well as their syntax.

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 suggest you review the official 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 popular 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 Angular 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 applications. 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 find these sections easy to skim to find 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 components, 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 services 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 chapter 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 applications 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.

If you have some prior experience with Angular or are interested in particular topics, feel free to head straight for those chapters. I believe you can skim early sections that cover familiar material and then look more closely at later parts of a chapter to learn more complex capabilities. As you skim, keep an eye out for diagrams that explain various concepts; they’re a great way to quickly validate whether you understand the topic at hand. If there are unfamiliar concepts, you can always refer to other chapters.

Most chapters feature fairly extensive examples. In order to do them properly, you’ll have to follow along through the whole chapter. The final versions of the code are provided if you don’t want to follow the examples and build the code yourself, but I strongly encourage you to code along. You’ll understand the coding and retain the information more effectively that way. If you run into any issues with a chapter example, you can check the GitHub project for any potential code changes that were required after the book’s publication (such as if a breaking change has been introduced in Angular). Stack Overflow is also a great place to ask any questions that extend beyond the chapter example code.

About the code

All the code in this book can be downloaded from GitHub at https://github.com/angular-in-action. (A zip file containing the complete code at time of publication will also be available from the publisher’s website at https://www.manning.com/books/angular-in-action.) Each chapter also provides a link to the specific chapter content, so you don’t need to download everything ahead of time.

You’ll need to have a recent version of NodeJS installed on your machine. Chapter 1 covers more specific things to install for the Angular CLI. You also need a modern browser—preferably one that has good debugging tools, like Chrome. If you’re running an outdated browser (like IE10), the code won’t run, so update your browser for compatibility and security.

This book contains many examples of source code, both in numbered listings and inline with normal text. In both cases, source code is formatted in a fixed-width font like this to separate it from ordinary text. Sometimes code is also in bold to highlight code that has changed from previous steps in the chapter, such as when a new feature adds to an existing line of code.

In many cases, the original source code, has been reformatted; we’ve added line breaks and reworked indentation to accommodate the available page space in the book. In rare cases, even this was not enough, and listings include line-continuation markers (➥). Additionally, comments in the source code have often been removed from the listings when the code is described in the text. Code annotations accompany many of the listings, highlighting important concepts.

Book forum

Purchase of Angular in Action includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the author and from other users. To access the forum, go to https://forums.manning.com/forums/angular-in-action. You can also learn more about Manning's forums and the rules of conduct at https://forums.manning.com/forums/about.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the author can take place. It is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author, whose contribution to the forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the author some challenging questions lest his interest stray! The forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.