Q&A with Brad Green, author of “AngularJS”

Q. What makes this book important right now?

A. Angular’s popularity has increased dramatically this year. It’s gone from being used by early adopters to mainstream deployments at big companies like Netflix, HBO, Morgan Stanley, Salesforce.com, Intuit, eBay, and, of course, Google. We’re hoping this book makes widespread adoption easier for individuals and whole teams wanting to experience the benefits of Angular.

Q. What information do you hope that readers of your book will walk away with?

A. We’ve focused the book on Angular’s core concepts like data binding, dependency injection, and directives and explained how to use them to eliminate boilerplate, organize your code, and extend HTML’s syntax to succinctly express the intent of your application. We also hope that we’ve shown how Angular makes it trivial to write and run tests as a core part of your development process.

Q: What’s the most exciting thing happening in your space?

A. In general, we’re excited that web development is moving from the wild west of hand-built applications to getting huge productivity gains by using a framework. In addition to the incredible apps folks are developing, we’re very excited about the many developer tools and libraries created to work with Angular. Yeoman.io has AngularJS generators to automate your dependency management. Salesforce.com released an Angular-specific mobile development pack. BreezeJS provides rich database management capabilities. AngularUI , KendoUI , Wijmo, and many others have rich component libraries. We’re excited to see what comes next.

Q. Can you give us a few tips to get us started with AngularJS?

1. Get used to writing tests early! We’ve made it easy and built the fastest test runner on the planet so you get instant feedback on changes to code.
2. AngularJS apps are structured differently from what you might be used to in jQuery. In Angular, you drive all UI updates by changing model data and binding part of your template appropriately. This includes hiding and showing parts of your app, switching views, and displaying any data.
3. For the best user experience, make sure you use ng-href, ng-src, and ng-img instead of href, src, and img in your templates. Without these, you may see side effects while the page is loading.
4. In Angular, there is no main method. Angular takes care of all application bootstrapping and assembling your application based on your specifications the template. If you find you really need to execute a function on load, you can do this through your application module’s run() function. For example: var app = angular.module(‘myApp’, []); app.run(function() { // your initialization code… }