Getting started with Angular 5 — #LearnAngular
Getting started is a series of post on learning Angular for beginners. Follow the series to get a jump start in knowing what this client-side framework has to offer and how you would be able to leverage it to make incredibly reactive applications. These posts aim to be short and focused only on a limited scope at a time.
Every post will be updated with post to next and previous post to help you maintain continuity. Feel free to leave your feedback to help us improve the post.
What is Angular ?
Angular is a JavaScript framework that helps developing web applications. It provides a number of features which helps in rapidly developing complex requirement in a very trivial and fairly simple manner. Of course, there is a learning curve to it. But once you understand it thoroughly you would be able to save plenty of efforts in delivering complex requirements with a great user experience and maintainable code.
Just to quote in detail what Angular is all about. Following is taken from angular.io:
Angular is a platform that makes it easy to build applications with the web. Angular combines declarative templates, dependency injection, end to end tooling, and integrated best practices to solve development challenges. Angular empowers developers to build applications that live on the web, mobile, or the desktop
No worries if you don’t quite seem to understand this part. We will take one step at a time and continue our journey to understand Angular.
Is a framework even required?
Well, you can happily build an application with server-side rendered HTML/CSS and sprinkle a bit of behavior with JavaScript on the client end. This usually suffices the need for having an interface with some sort of behavior, delivering a better user experience. Thus simply ignoring all the hype that these frameworks have built around them.
But when it comes to building extra ordinary reactive user interfaces which could multiply your user experience, then the conventional way of developing your application may seem to drag you a little and make the overall development process a bit slower. The more lines of code you add for writing complex behavior, more are the chances of the application getting broken when some changes are made.
The hype around framework is not entirely without any merits. In order to fully evaluate and come to a conclusion you would have to understand and try out frameworks. This would help you choose the best one which is a right fit for the job.
And if you ask are there alternative to Angular. Yes, there are many. Ember, Vue.js, Polymer and Aurelia are a few popular client side frameworks. Since this series all about learning Angular we will focus on the same.
Versioning of Angular
Angular 2 is complete rewrite of Angular 1. The preceding versions of Angular 2 namely 4 and 5 are some changes in the core libraries that demand SEMVER version (Semantic Version) change. The framework is now simply called Angular instead of AngularJS.
Semantic Versioning is all about adding meaning to version numbers. A semantic version consists of three numbers:
Example: 2.3.1 — Major (Breaking Change).Minor (New Features, not breaking).Path (Bug Fixes not breaking)
But if you did a bit of web search you would have noticed that there is no version 3. This is actually due to a misalignment of a package in the angular repository. Hence the team decided to skip the number and go ahead with version 4.
If you check Official GitHub repository where the source code is hosted, progressive releases are available.
In the next post, we will be setting up our development environment to get started with developing our first Angular application. Sign up for our newsletter to get notified when the next article will be published.
