What is Angular?

Angular is a development platform that is written in the TypeScript language. It consists of smaller sub-systems, including a JavaScript framework, a command-line interface, a language service, and a rich collection of first-party libraries.

Angular enables developers to build scalable web applications with TypeScript, a strict syntactic superset of JavaScript. Developing with Angular does not require knowledge of JavaScript, but it is nice to have. We will learn more details about TypeScript in Chapter 2, Introduction to TypeScript.

The official Angular documentation can be found at https://www.angular.io.

We suggest relying first on the official Angular documentation and then on any other sources because it is the most up-to-date source for Angular development.

Angular was created by a team internally at Google. The first version, 1.0, was released in 2012 and was called AngularJS. AngularJS was a JavaScript framework, and web applications built with it were written in JavaScript.

In 2016 the Angular team decided to make a revolutionary change in AngularJS. The team joined forces with the TypeScript team at Microsoft and introduced TypeScript into the framework. A vital consideration towards that decision was decorators, a powerful feature of the TypeScript language that Angular heavily uses. The next version of the framework, 2.0, was written in TypeScript and re-branded as Angular with a different logo than AngularJS.

In this book, we will cover Angular 15, which is the latest stable version of the Angular framework. AngularJS reached the end of its life in 2022, and it is no longer supported and maintained by the Angular team.

Angular is based on the most modern web standards and supports all the evergreen browsers. It is compatible with the two most recent major versions of all browsers except for Chrome and Firefox, which supports the latest ones.

In the following section, we will learn the benefits of choosing Angular for web development.