The Angular Guide — 1 : What is Angular? | JuniorDev

Image Source: Angular Logo from https://angular.io/presskit

This is a series of Angular Tutorials.

What is Angular?

Angular is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework which allows you to create reactive Single Page Applications

Let’s break this down, A Single Page Application or SPA for short is just one html file with a bunch of JavaScript files that dynamically rewrite the contents of the web-page ( the html file ), this makes the pages reactive meaning the data is fetched from the server only when the user asks for it and the process runs in the background making user experience really smooth.

Angular uses Typescript which is a super set of JavaScript as the primary language for it’s application development. Typescript benefits include:

1. Typescript provides highly productive development and debugging tools.
2. Typescript makes improves the readability of the code.
3. Typescript is strongly-typed, this greatly reduces the probability of accidental bugs in the code.
4. Typescript is aligned with ES development for compatibility.
5. Plus many more advantages which you can find here.

Why should you learn Angular?

Here are some of the key reasons to consider learning Angular.

• Angular is easy to learn.
• Angular supports SPA (Single Page Application) so it let’s you create beautiful, responsive and high performance web applications, you can even convert the Angular web application into a mobile or desktop application.
• Angular reduces the complexity in building and maintaining large web applications, it does this by the use of powerful tools like Angular CLI, Dependency Injection, etc ( we will learn more about this later ).
• Angular is quite popular, this means two things for us:
  1. you can get help online more easily
  2. your skill set will become more valuable
  Angular is used by companies like Up-work, PayPal, Forbes and Google (obviously, it’s made by them). You can find more usages here.

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020 — Web framework popularity

Which version should you learn?

Angular Versioning

I know…, at a first glance it looks confusing right? Let’s understand how we ended up with so many versions of angular. It all started with AngularJS it was a big hit back then but it had some issues with performance so they scraped it and re-wrote the entire framework. This new one was named Angular 2. These two versions are incompatible and hence we ended up with the weird versioning

• AngularJS -> AngularJS 1.x …………-> AngularJS 1.8
  ( Legacy version, commonly referred to as AngularJS )
• Angular 2 -> Angular 4 -> Angular 5 …..-> Angular 9
  ( New version, commonly referred to as Angular or Angular 2+)

The version which we will focus on this series is Angular 9 (Angular). Angular team release a new version almost every six months, but they are just performance improvements and additions of new features which do not break the existing ones.

Now that we are familiar with What Angular is, Why we need it and Which version we are going to learn ( It’s Angular 9 ), Let’s get our hands dirty with code in the next blog…☺

The Angular Guide — 2: Project Setup and Angular CLI | JuniorDev