3 reasons why you should follow Angular-In-Depth publication
AngularInDepth is moving away from Medium. All new articles and updates are hosted on the new platform inDepth.dev
Why I started the publication
Angular is a great framework. It makes many web development tasks that used to be tricky and time-consuming a breeze. But it’s also a complex framework and new features are being developed at a rapid pace. The official documentation has recently caught up with the extensible amount of functionality the framework offers and is now sufficient to understand major concepts and create a middle size app.
However, if you’re writing a large application, possibly a platform, you have to know the framework at the deeper level. Depending on the complexity of the application you’re working on I’d argue that you have to posses a solid knowledge of the core concepts like views, change detection and injectors and understand their mechanics. But as it currently stands there’s no information about the internals.
I’m working on the large platform now that hosts a variety of plugins developed by 3rd party developers and I find the understanding of the framework internal implementation highly beneficial. For example, knowing how a view is represented internally enables you to reuse the view if the component is moved and re-insert it into any other place on a canvas instead of using ngFor directive that destroys and recreates the view.
Unfortunately, when I started with Angular there was no detailed information about injectors hierarchy, views, change detection and other core concepts. I haven’t done much searching in the past six months but I’m willing to bet that most of the information that you can find in the articles published in Angular-In-Depth publication are not available anywhere else.
And the problem of course is not exclusive to Angular but also extends to other front-end technologies related to Angular like RxJs and Webpack.
RxJs is used extensively inside Angular in particular in Router and Forms modules. It simplifies working with asynchronous code and enables interesting reactive architectures. And just as with Angular it’s a pretty complex piece of software that develops fast but the documentation is lacking. For many operators the description is minimal and the examples are too trivial. Some operators are not documented at all.
Webpack is a great build technology that is de-facto the standard bundling tool. It was adopted by angular-cli so most Angular projects now rely on webpack to do the build. Up until recently the document was scarce and confusing but has been greatly improved. However, it still covers mostly high level concepts and basic configuration examples. If you’ve ever tried to configure complex build you know how frustrating it is to search for hours on end for a description of how a particular plugin works only to find the snippets demonstrating how to initialize the plugin.
It seems that the documentation will never be able to keep up with the rapid advances in these technologies. Especially the documentation on the core low-level implementation details. But as the web applications grow ever more complex we need that kind of knowledge to produce performant and extensible applications. And so I started Angular-In-Depth publication with the goal to provide these unique in-depth insights into the internals of all technologies related to or used inside Angular — the framework itself, RxJs, Webpack, TypeScript, FireBase etc.
Why you should follow Angular-In-Depth publication?
I’ve been thinking for a few days about how the publication I created stands out and why you want to follow it. Here are the three reasons I’ve come up with:
- Unique and in-depth knowledge
- Constant updates monitoring
- Stackoverflow support
Unique and in-depth knowledge
The authors who publish articles on our blog usually spend considerable amount of time exploring sources which according to many developers is the single source of truth. The knowledge that they learn is shared in the articles published in Angular-In-Depth. It’s extremely rare for a documentation team to produce documentation on the low-level implementation details so for many developers the sources become the only available documentation. Unfortunately reading sources is not the option for most developers due to lack of time or required knowledge. If you’ve never read the sources try it and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Yet our publication gives you the opportunity to tap into that unique in-depth knowledge hidden in the sources and significantly advance your programming skills level and competitive edge.
Monitor updates and write about first
Authors who publish articles on our blog stay up to date with changes and regularly monitor updates to Angular framework and related technologies. As the main contributor to the blog I use many sources for that — Angular Weekly Meeting Notes, change log and Angular official twitter account and others. And we’re not just monitoring them but also try to write an extensive explanation of the change as soon as possible. For example, we’ve published Angular deprecates ReflectiveInjector and introduces StaticInjector. Should you care? before the release of Angular v5. So by following our publication you’ll learn about the upcoming breaking changes or new improvements before they are released.
Stackoverflow support
Many authors on this publication are active stackoverflow users. We’re driven by internal motivation (and the rep 😃) to help other people solve their programming challenges. Many articles are written and forgotten but that’s not the case for the articles published in Angular-In-Depth. If you have a question regarding an article you’ve found in our publication just post a question on stackoverflow and drop a link in a comment and the author will get back to you as soon as possible. You can also use the #AngularInDepth hashtag on Twitter.
Do you want to write for Angular-In-Depth?
We’re a very young publication striving to become the go-to place for in-depth and unique content related to Angular technologies. We’re looking for new authors and very loyal to those who just begin their writing journey. If you spend some time debugging sources and have some unique insights worth sharing submit your articles to our publication! Let’s build the best Angular related publication on medium together.
