Chapter 1. Introducing Angular 2
This chapter covers
- A brief overview of JavaScript frameworks and libraries
- A high-level overview of Angular 1 and 2
- A toolbox for the Angular developer
- Introducing the sample application
Angular 2 is an open source JavaScript framework maintained by Google. It’s a complete rewrite of its popular predecessor, AngularJS. Angular applications can be developed in JavaScript (using the syntax of ECMAScript 5 or 6), Dart, or TypeScript. In this book we’ll use TypeScript; our reasons for this are explained in appendix B.
Prerequisites
In this book, we don’t expect you to have any experience with AngularJS. We do expect you to know the syntax of JavaScript and HTML and to understand what web applications consist of. We also assume that you know what CSS is and that you’re familiar with the role of the DOM object in a browser.
We’ll start this chapter with a very brief overview of some popular JavaScript frameworks. Then we’ll review the architecture of the older AngularJS and the newer Angular 2, highlighting the improvements that the new version of this framework brings to the table. We’ll also quickly run through the tools that Angular developers use. Finally, we’ll introduce the sample application that we’re going to build in this book.
Note
This book is about the Angular 2 framework, and for brevity we’ll call it Angular throughout. If we mention AngularJS, we’re talking about the 1.x versions of this framework.