Preface

"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."                                                                                                      -Mike Tyson, undisputed heavyweight champion boxer

Soon after its creation in 2009, AngularJS grew into a widely popular foundational tool for building frontend applications. As years and releases went by, and the JavaScript community matured, the world of client-side programming broadened beyond what Angular was originally designed for. Its caretakers took stock and decided that a sweeping overhaul of the framework was in order.

AngularJS, now Angular 1, still exists and will be supported for the years to come, but in its wake lies Angular 2—a wholly different animal built for the future of client-side computing. Angular 2 abandons antipatterns by the fistful and, instead, is reshaped into a precise and elegant software instrument. It embraces the impending renaissance of web technologies, building atop ES6, web components, web workers, TypeScript, and reactive programming, to name a few. It brings framework modularity to new heights, building itself around the concept that any modular piece of Angular 2 should be easily discarded or replaced. Best of all, Angular 2 offers a bountiful collection of configuration and tooling that will make your applications run at breakneck speed.

To many developers, Angular 2 is frightening because so much of it is new and unfamiliar. This book exists to offer you an approachable path to a full understanding of Angular 2, what it offers, and how best to use it. You will find both simple examples to set a foundational understanding, and complex demonstrations to hint at the framework's power. The book is organized into recipes that are independent of each other, so you are able to jump in at any point and immediately begin learning.