Preface
Welcome to the wonderful world of web development! This book has been designed to teach you the fundamentals of the Angular platform and equip you with useful recipes and practical code examples, so you can create rich and scalable line-of-business applications. The book emphasizes a minimalist approach, by maximizing the use of built-in libraries and avoiding the introduction of additional third-party dependencies to achieve the desired outcome. As a result of this approach, your code will be easier to maintain and upgrade, as new versions of Angular are released frequently. You may continue using this book as a learning resource, as the fundamental concepts, technologies, and samples included in the book will remain relevant for some time to come, albeit with slight modifications. The tools and services recommended in the book have been updated to their latest versions, circa 2020, however, tools and services continually evolve, change, and sometimes outright disappear. If and when this happens, feel free to reach out to me for alternatives.
This book will also aim to instill an Agile and DevOps mindset in you so that you confidently create reliable and flexible solutions. Whether you consider yourself a freelancer developing software for small businesses, a full-stack developer, an enterprise developer, or a web developer, what you need to know to design, architect, develop, maintain, deliver, and deploy a web application, and the best practices and patterns you need to apply to achieve those things, don't vary all that much. If you are delivering an application to an audience of users, in a sense, you are a full-stack developer, since you must be aware of a lot of server technologies. In fact, if you master how to deliver Angular applications using TypeScript, it won't be difficult for you to write your own RESTful APIs using Node.js, Express.js, and TypeScript, which is demonstrated through a concrete implementation later in the book.
By some definitions, a full-stack developer needs to know everything from catering to international copyright law to successfully create and operate an application on today's web. If you're an entrepreneur, in a sense, this is true. However, in this book, your culinary skills and law degrees need not apply. This book assumes that you already know how to work with web development basics and have familiarity working with RESTful APIs with the tech stack of your choice, and if not, fear not, just follow the hands-on step-by-step instructions and you will be able to create your first API-enabled Angular app in no time.
