How I learned angularJS
About me
I am a programmer, who is trying to program his life by writing computer programs. I am passionate about learning new technologies. I am very much attracted to new trending technologies. And like others I also try to digest almost all new technologies. And most of the time I could not achieve up to the mark.
I have completed more than one decade in this industry. In this duration I got chance to work with lots of new technologies. But my primary platform was always .net framework. I have been doing freelance work since 7-8 years. Freelancing work force developer to learn new things regularly as we need to be in sync with market demand.
Why I wanted to learn angularJS
I was expert in asp.net and asp.net MVC. But now a days, knowing .net is not enough, we have to compete with other developers with the different skill sets. I was very impressed with jQuery as it is very lightweight and it is very strong in handling DOM(HTML Elements). My friends used to escape from jQuery as they were afraid of it. I learned jQuery quickly and taught to my colleagues as well. I impressed them by demonstrating the power of jQuery. After that my friends asked me to teach jQuery. And I feel proud that I motivated them to learn something new.
Later I came to know about AngularJS. The way AngularJS binds data and trigger/broadcast the events it is really a great milestone for javaSript framework.
How I approached learning angularJS
To learn AngularJS I read few tutorials online, which was helpful to understand it better with different different point of views. I bought 2 angularJS reference books. And these books broaden my knowledge lot more. Till now I was pretty much confidant to solve real world scenario/projects. I started doing projects in angularJS which actually helped a lot to learn AngularJS. I started giving few online tuition on angularJS to corporate employees, which increased my confidence and I started exploring github repositories to find out more and something new. I subscribed to Pluralsight and Lynda.com to upgrade myself to Angular4 and I made habit of watching at least one video on the daily basis. And I think I am in better position now. If I get more chance I can teach Angular4 as well.
Challenges I faced
While I started learning AngularJS 1.xx it was pretty interesting and I was literally enjoying it. I did few projects in AngularJS 1.xx. And after few years Google released Angular2(ng2). Due to workload I could not start early to learn ng2 but after few months I started learning though Pluralsight.com and a great news appears in my screen that Angular4 is launched. And Angular2 and 4 don't have backward compatibility. Whatever I coded in Angular 1.xx is now legacy. I got few upgrade request from clients, which was hard for me to upgrade. It was like writing whole code from scratch. Anyway I re-written new code from scratch. And that was one of the challenge I faced in my career (NO BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY).
Key takeaways
When I compare Angular with older versions I find it is faster, richer and lightweight. Here are few points I am listing down for quick understanding:
- Lightweight: Angular4 is 60% lightweight from its older version Angular2.
- Compatibility with TypeScript 2.xx: Angular4 is compatible with TypeScript 2.1 and next releases. Which helps with better type checking and also enhanced IDE features for Visual Studio Code.
- SEO Friendly: As angular 4, added Router ParamMap which actually maps parameters with rout params. And it makes URL more SEO friendly. e.g. www.abc.com/product/45
- Animation Support: Animation support is added as a part of a separate package.
Tips and advice
It is a very simple and easy task to upgrade Angular 2.0 to 4.0, but this has to be done only if the applications demand it.
There is need to check the challenges and bottleneck faced while updating the applications in Angular v4.0 which was built in Angular 2.0.
Final thoughts and next steps
If anyone wants to take complete benefits of new technology then I suggest please learn it as soon as it launches. Learning something new never get into loss. And we get used to while other starts learning it.
Later I have learned Node.js which helped me lot to find new job and projects. Node.js has good compatibility with client side JavaScript frameworks.
