Mastering Web Application Development with AngularJS 7/29/13 Edition

My journey to using AngularJS (NG) was quite raw, relying entirely on the onlinedocumentation, API documentation, blog posts, Google group, and stackoverflowlinks. Surely, not unique, but definitely lacking in some ways since the NGdocumentation is notoriously brief when you get to the "rich" (aka hard) parts.After 6 months hacking on NG apps, I got really curious about what "the experts"had to say and this book seemed to fit the bill.The first thing that struck me is that the book is not meant to be your firstintroduction to web application development of any kind SPA or not. All devtopics are given some coverage, but it is pretty clear that the authors aremaster NG users, so be aware before purchasing it. Topics about how to utilizeNG functionality, debug performance issues, and also optimize them reveal asolid and in-depth understanding. Although they are at the learning-arc wherethey grok it, they are still on that path, and the result is copious amounts ofcode in some areas in an attempt to "make the point", when teaching the pointwould have saved a lot of time and space. At times there is a lot of fluffand over-speak, seemingly meant to blow up the page count, and I blame theeditors for that.There are many lovable things about this book but I'll focus on the top two.First, the book covers real world issues. The build process, authentication,authorization, build and deploy, artifact management, dependency management,project structure, and testing are covered in depth. If you want to maintainyour sanity, this book is priceless for the topic alone (experienced developerswill already know all this, but listing the best of breed tools is stillhelpful). Second, the authors have a passion for the technology, and that comesthrough as they get into relatively under-taught topics like the engine thatpowers NG and what you need to know to keep your apps performant. That isreally one of the most interesting things that this book reveals: NG makessimple apps easy and impossible apps possible, but with a price, you must grokthe engine. Dev teams that laze-out and "wait until we need to" learn how theguts work will suffer accordingly due to the non-obvious interdependencies ofthe event structure inherent to the technology. Their explanation oftransclusion warrants purchasing the book, seriously, no one else seems to trulyunderstand how to explain the feature (or I'm too dumb to grok the API docs).The formatting on the Kindle is super. The book is oddly overly simplisticoffering poor coding styles in some parts and extremely amazingly over technicalin others. The coverage on forms is better than everything else out there, andyet at the same time doesn't seem to cover reusability of validation and datamodels across the enterprise. The chapters on directives are quite nice, andhelps you to "think different" about what it means to serve your client, andyour team using the tech. Pages and pages of code samples could be summarizedwith eloquent teaching, but everybody has deadlines so I get it._Mastering Web Application Development with AngularJS_ is a delightful book. Ittackles what you will eventually learn on your own. It is kind of like beingable to sit with a NG master and brainstorm with them and listen to their warstories turned lessons. It is for developers who have been around the block afew times though, so start elsewhere to learn HTTP, CSS, JavaScript, Asyncprogramming, multi-threaded programming GUI programming, and architecture beforediving into this book. If you grok a functional programming language likeScheme, and a declarative programming language like CLIPS, then you willappreciate the amazing and awesome power of AngularJS even more. Thanks for thegreat book. 5/5

I greatly enjoyed this book as it addressed several of the various concerns that go into developing a non-trivial professional application in angular js. The initial chapters of the book shine light on basic angular concepts, such as the way that modules work and how to define services. This helped me better understand the overall design of the framework, then simply going through code snippets and the more disjointed online api docs.The book then goes into other areas, such as communicating with a back-end, testing, performance evaluation, and deployment considerations. The sample code provided with the project on github gives a hand-on example of how to structure an advanced app, and for the most part, the app is organized in a way that makes a lot of sense: divided along cross-cutting technical concerns, and also also along functional concerns.While the authors do a good job in explaining complex concepts in relatively good English for (what appear to be) non-native writers, I agree with other reviewers that the publisher of the book should have done a better job in editing the final text to smooth out the non-native idiosyncrasies of the text, which can sometimes be distracting, though they do not take away from the content of the text. I would have given the book 5 stars otherwise.I would not recommend this book is not for novice programmers, though. It discusses various advanced topics such as Dependency Injection, promises, which may be confusing, and which significance may not be obvious to new developers. I would heartily recommend it to medium and advanced users, along with the sample app on github, who want a good concrete example of a modern industrial strength single-page js app connected to a back-end. I am happy to have bought the book.

As other reviewers have noted, this book seems to make the promise of building a sample application but never gets there. In chapter 2 we read, "In the following chapters we are going to build a simplified project management tool... This sample application will help us to demonstrate AngularJS APIs and idioms as well as cover typical scenarios, such as communicating with a back-end, organizing navigation, security, internationalization, and so on." And, "To showcase AngularJS in its most advantageous environment we are going to build a project management tool..." I'm not sure if the authors changed their minds, or if these statements are just poorly worded, but this building of a sample application never happens.Rather, you must download the complete application and then try match each chapter with the various places in code they are referencing. This makes it very difficult to follow, and not very helpful to someone learning a new framework.The book (at least, the Kindle version) also suffers from a incredible number of typos, grammar errors, etc.

This book is very clear about how and why. I read many online AngularJS introduction and watched youtube trying to get crash course quickly, I had basic understanding of what AngularJS can do, but I felt I still need to read a book to understand more to become comfortable to use it for real project. This book did not disappoint me. I finished first 6 chapters and gained confidence to use it for first project. Rest of them: chapter 7 - chapter 12 covers advanced topic, I can wait to read them later. One caveat of this book I felt about this book is on chapter 3: Promise API, author did not explain it well, I am still puzzled about the theory and practice, I may have to read it again. The author assumes readers already downloaded sample project and were going through it with same speed as they read the book, actually I just read the book, did not bother to download the code. Maybe I will do it later.