NodeJS

Welcome to Node.js: Part 7 – AngularJS

August 5, 2014

A strangely fantastic top result in my Google image search for “open courseware”

I’d like to take a moment and point out a few resources that have sprung up in the last few years. The “Open Courseware” movement is developing by leaps and bounds. Kahn Academy, Code Academy, Code School, and MIT Open Courseware are only a few of the educational services free to the public (though, MIT and Code School do charge for some of their higher level content).

While I maintain a rigorous distrust against most manifestations of societal optimism, I have to admit it’s pretty awesome that just about anyone (who can read and access a computer) anywhere (with an internet connection) can progress from a kindergarten level student to a masters-equivalent physicist or crack-shot programming prodigy—or both—for free. I’d have to massage my misanthropic tendencies pretty hard to come up with any legitimate complaints about this. I become positively giddy when I see their clean front pages and the promises of all that learnin’—almost as deliriously satisfying as it is to walk down a paper and pen aisle in a store. All that clean paper and all those fresh pens… Mmmmm…

Ahem. Where was I?  Ah, yes. Resources on top of resources are available to the eager and self-disciplined would-be-pupil. I just wanted to encourage everyone in the whole wide world to take a hold of that brain with which you’ve been blessed and dive in deep.

We have come far in understanding Node.js, Express, and MongoDB. Now we can look at what AngularJS has to offer. After meandering through the official website‘s helpful documentation, I’m impressed. AngularJS and MongoDB both have thorough and approachable documentation for folks like us. To a degree, the AngularJS guides even help explain the programming patterns and principles in use, such as dependency injection and Model-View-Controller components. It does get a little higher level, but it’s quite nice to read something and not feel like this poor guy (on the left) by the end.

I know this is a little short, and perhaps not terribly informative. Sorry. I’ve spent the better part of two days reading through Angular’s documentation. According to them:

AngularJS is a structural framework for dynamic web apps. It lets you use HTML as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. Angular’s data binding and dependency injection eliminate much of the code you currently have to write. And it all happens within the browser, making it an ideal partner with any server technology.

AngularJS is a structural framework for dynamic web apps.

The index to their Developer Guide is alphabetically arranged. I suggest starting with (surprise) the Introduction, and then read through Modules, Scopes, Data Binding, Controllers, and go on from there. After all this reading, I’ve just barely begun on the rather thorough-looking official tutorial. I’ll tackle that in the next post. As before, I won’t regurgitate what they’ve already covered, but describe the questions and problems I face in trying to follow along.