Learn Angular: Related Tool & Skills

By Jurgen van de Moere, Florian Rappl, Ilya Bodrov-Krukowski and 3 more

Angular is not just a framework, but rather a platform that empowers developers to build applications for the web, mobile, and the desktop.

This book provides an overview of some essential Angular tools--such as Angular CLI, Angular Augary, and Sublime Text--as well as outlining some must-have TypeScript tips.

This book is for all front-end developers who want to become proficient with Angular and its related tools. You'll need to be familiar with HTML and CSS and have a reasonable level of understanding of JavaScript in order to follow the discussion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SitePoint
• Release date: Jun 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781492068419

Jurgen van de Moere

Front-end Architect at The Force - specializing in JavaScript and AngularJS. Developer Expert at Google. Gymnast. Dad. Family man. Creator of Angular Express.

Book preview

Preface

So, why Angular? Well, because it’s supported on various platforms (web, mobile, desktop native), it’s powerful, modern, has a nice ecosystem, and it’s just cool. Not convinced? Let's be a bit more eloquent, then:

Angular presents you not only the tools but also design patterns to build your project in a maintainable way. When an Angular application is crafted properly, you don’t end up with a tangle of classes and methods that are hard to modify and even harder to test. The code is structured conveniently and you won’t need to spend much time in order to understand what is going on.

It’s JavaScript, but better. Angular is built with TypeScript, which in turn relies on JS ES6. You don’t need to learn a totally new language, but you still receive features like static typing, interfaces, classes, namespaces, decorators etc.

No need to reinvent the bicycle. With Angular, you already have lots of tools to start crafting the application right away. You have directives to give HTML elements dynamic behavior. You can power up the forms using FormControl and introduce various validation rules. You may easily send asynchronous HTTP requests of various types. You can set up routing with little hassle. And there are many more goodies that Angular can offer us!

Components are decoupled. Angular strived to remove tight coupling between various components of the application. Injection happens in NodeJS-style and you may replace various components with ease.

All DOM manipulation happens where it should happen. With Angular, you don’t tightly couple presentation and the application’s logic making your markup much cleaner and simpler.

Testing is at the heart. Angular is meant to be thoroughly tested and it supports both unit and end-to-end testing with tools like Jasmine and Protractor.

Angular is mobile and desktop-ready, meaning you have one framework for multiple platforms.

Angular is actively maintained and has a large community and ecosystem. You can find lots of materials on this framework as well as many useful third-party tools.

So, we can say that Angular is not just a framework, but rather a platform that empowers developers to build applications for the web, mobile, and the desktop.

This book provides an overview of some essential Angular tools, as well as outlining some must-have TypeScript tips.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for all front-end developers who want to get proficient with Angular and its related tools. You’ll need to be familiar with HTML and CSS and have a reasonable level of understanding of JavaScript in order to follow the discussion.

Conventions Used

Code Samples

Code in this book is displayed using a fixed-width font, like so:

A Perfect Summer's Day

It was a lovely day for a walk in the park.

The birds were singing and the kids were all back at school.

Where existing code is required for context, rather than repeat all of it, ⋮ will be displayed:

function animate() {

    ⋮

new_variable = Hello;

 

}

Some lines of code should be entered on one line, but we’ve had to wrap them because of page constraints. An ➥ indicates a line break that exists for formatting purposes only, and should be ignored:

URL.open("http://www.sitepoint.com/responsive-web-

➥design-real-user-testing/?responsive1");

You’ll notice that we’ve used certain layout styles throughout this book to signify different types of information. Look out for the following items.

Tips, Notes, and Warnings

Hey, You!

Tips provide helpful little pointers.

Ahem, Excuse Me ...

Notes are useful asides that are related—but not critical—to the topic at hand. Think of them as extra tidbits of information.

Make Sure You Always ...

... pay attention to these important points.

Watch Out!

Warnings highlight any gotchas that are likely to trip you up along the way.

Chapter 1: The Ultimate Angular CLI Reference Guide

by Jurgen Van de Moere

In this article, we’ll have a look at what Angular CLI is, what it can do for you, and how it performs some of its magic behind the scenes. Even if you already use Angular CLI, this article can serve as a reference to better understand its inner workings.

Technically, you’re not required to use Angular CLI to develop an Angular application, but its many features can highly improve the quality of your code and save you a lot of time along the way.

Some History

On September 15, 2016, Angular Final was released.

Where AngularJS 1.x was limited to a framework, Angular has grown into an ambitious platform that allows you to develop fast and scalable applications across all platforms such as web, mobile web, native mobile and even native desktop.

With this transition to a platform, tooling has become more important than ever. However, setting up and configuring tooling is not always easy. To make sure Angular developers can focus on building applications with as little friction as possible, the Angular team is putting a lot of effort into providing developers with a high-quality development toolset.

Part of that toolset are close integrations with a wide array of IDEs and editors. Another part of that toolset is Angular CLI.

So let’s get started!

What Is Angular CLI?

Angular CLI is a command-line interface (CLI) to automate your development workflow. It allows you to:

create a new Angular application

run a development server with LiveReload support