If you search for jobs in web development for long enough, you’ll soon notice that one of the names that keeps coming up again and again is AngularJS—both as a standalone specialization and also as a required skill for other jobs. Whether you want to build a career as a dedicated AngularJS pro or simply add it to your web developer’s toolkit, this article will tell you what you need to know to work with Angular.
AngularJS: What is it?
First things first: what is AngularJS? To begin with, as the name implies, it’s based on the JavaScript programming language. Angular is a front-end framework for web development: it provides a standardized way to build web apps quickly, efficiently, and safely. AngularJS runs “on the client side”, meaning that once a user has loaded your web page on her or his end, interactivity and changes to the page are possible without requiring another call to the server: the loaded page is simply rewritten in the browser.Why learn it?
So why is AngularJS so popular? And why might you want to learn it?
First, it’s amazingly powerful and yet (reasonably) beginner-friendly. It lets you create beautiful, efficient front-end experiences for your users without requiring much in the way of back-end knowledge. Second, it’s open source and largely maintained by Google, which means you get the best of both worlds. The biggest name in tech has a vested interest in supporting it, but it’s also free to all and responsive to the needs of its community of developers. Finally, if you’re looking to get into full-stack web development, it’s the front-end part of one of the most popular software stacks around: MEAN (no points for guessing which letter stands for “Angular”). So what are some of the core skills and competencies for an AngularJS developer to learn?The Basics
JavaScript
Well, it’s got “JS” in the name for a reason. And yes, if you want to be really proficient in AngularJS, you’ll want to have a solid grounding in JavaScript (otherwise you’ll just wind up copying lines of code from Stack Overflow without really having any idea what you’re doing). That said, it isn’t necessary to be an absolute master of JavaScript in order to work—and work well—with AngularJS. And there are a lot of extremely well-designed video courses and readable tutorials online that make getting up to speed in JavaScript as painless as possible. Once you’ve got the basics of the language’s syntax down, and understand some of its common features and quirks, jumping into full-on Angular development will be a lot easier.HTML and CSS
As we mentioned above, AngularJS is a front-end web development framework that works on the client side. That means that it does what it does by working with the HTML and CSS files that your server sends to your end user’s browser. Obviously, then, it’s going to be crucial that you understand the basics of how HTML and CSS work…and then get good at them. For a brief video intro to HTML and a companion series for CSS, check out the Dev Tips YouTube channel. These are fun, useful, and informative introductions to the basic technologies of front-end design. For a more thorough grounding in HTML and CSS, you’ve literally got hundreds (if not thousands) of options to choose from online. But the tutorials at W3Schools, both for HTML and CSS, are thorough, come with examples and exercises that can be done in your browser, and, maybe best of all, are completely free.AngularJS
This one’s kind of a “no-brainer”. If you’re going to work with this framework, you’ll need to learn it inside and out. Fortunately, there are some excellent free resources and even full courses online. And if you’re willing and able to spend a little bit more money, online code school Udemy has a full AngularJS course available that comes with lots of projects to help you learn and practice your newfound skills. Added bonus? These sorts of projects are great for showing to potential employers as part of your developer’s portfolio.
