Chapter 1: Building Your First Angular App

To better understand how to develop an Angular application, we need to learn some basic but essential things so that we can have a great experience on our journey with the Angular framework. One of the basic things that we should know is semantic versioning, which is the way that the Angular team has chosen to deal with changes between different versions of the framework. It will hopefully make it easier to find the right solutions to future app development challenges when you visit the official Angular documentation website (https://angular.io) or other sites (such as Stack Overflow) to search for solutions.

Another important but sometimes painful topic is that of project setup. It is a necessary evil that needs to be done at the beginning of a project, but getting this right early on can reduce a lot of friction as your application grows. Therefore, a large part of this chapter is dedicated to Angular CLI, a tool developed by the Angular team that provides scaffolding and automation tasks in an Angular app, demystifying the process and enabling you as a developer to save yourself from facing future frustrations and migraines. We will use the Angular CLI to create our first application from scratch, get a feel for the anatomy of an Angular application, and take a sneak peek at how Angular works under the hood.

Working with an Angular project without an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) can be painful. Our favorite code editor can provide us with an agile development workflow that includes TypeScript compilation at runtime, static type checking, and introspection, code completion, and visual assistance for debugging and building our app. We will highlight some popular code editors and take a bird's eye view of how each one of them can assist us when developing Angular applications.

To sum up, here are the main topics that we will explore in this chapter:

• Semantic versioning, why it matters, and Angular's take on it
• How to set up an Angular project using Angular CLI 10
• How to use Angular CLI commands to accomplish certain tasks, such as building and serving an Angular app
• How to create our first application and begin to understand the core concepts in Angular
• The available tooling for Angular in popular IDEs