Chapter 1, Creating our First Component in Angular, covers Semantic versioning. This is an important concept to grasp, so you know whether to adopt new releases based on your needs. This chapter also introduces the reader to the Angular CLI and the reader will be taking their first steps into writing an Angular application.
Chapter 2, IDEs and Plugins, introduces you to the most popular IDEs. The most common Angular plugins and snippets are also described to further boost developer productivity.
Chapter 3, Introducing TypeScript, introduces TypeScript, which is the chosen language for coding Angular apps. There is more to TypeScript than just adding types. Your code can be made elegant and more secure, and using the right features will save you from typing quite a lot.
Chapter 4, Implementing Properties and Events in our Components, covers how to send data to components and how to bind methods to them so that the components have the ability to communicate upstream.
Chapter 5, Enhancing our Component with Pipes and Directives, shows how you can make your component more consistent and reusable with the help of pipes and directives.
Chapter 6, Building an Application with Angular Components, dives right into our goal of building a real application. We address how to think and how to use the most common structural directives in order to control how the data should be displayed and act when being manipulated by UI elements.
Chapter 7, Asynchronous Data Services with Angular, introduces the RxJS library, which not only helps us with AJAX but also facilitates reactive application patterns. All things async become one concept under RxJS, the possibilities that this introduces are endless.
Chapter 8, Firebase, explains Firebase, which is a product by Google that allows you to have backend as a service. Firebase lets you focus on building Angular apps while it takes care of almost everything else. The best part is Firebase's reactive nature, which makes chat-like applications as well as collaboration apps a breeze to create.
Chapter 9, Routing, explains the concept of routing, so you can scale your application seamlessly.
Chapter 10, Forms in Angular, covers the two main ways of dealing with forms and user input: template-driven and the reactive approach.
Chapter 11, Angular Material, takes you through Angular Material, which not only offers a beautiful interface but also comes with a bunch of components that will make it a piece of cake to quickly assemble an impressive application.
Chapter 12, Animating Components with Angular, covers how well Angular supports the developer in leveraging and controlling quite advanced animations.
Chapter 13, Unit Testing in Angular, explains unit testing in Angular. The Angular team has really added first-class support for testing, so you, with a very few lines of code, are able to test all the possible constructs your mind can dream up. Everything from component, service, and directives to E2E testing.
Appendix A, SystemJS, covers SystemJS, which is a module loader and used to be the only way to set up an Angular application. It's still a valid way to set up your project. This Appendix will cover the core parts of SystemJS and zoom in on the Angular set up bit in particular.
Appendix B, Webpack with Angular, aims at showing the developer how to set up your Angular project with Webpack. There definitely exists a user base that wants complete control of every aspect of a web project. If that is you, then this appendix is for you.