Short Version/TL;DR: Christian and I are writing a continuously deployed ebook about AngularJS for .NET developers (or, more generally, for business application developers) at http://henriquat.re. You can also follow us on twitter at @henriquatreJS
After nearly three years of creating client-side JavaScript applications, after much contemplating, framework-researching, trying, abandoning, trying something else, and abandoning it again, I've stumbled upon AngularJS a few months ago.
Before Angular, I have not been a big fan of most of the existing clientside JavaScript-frameworks. Either their forcing me into certain ways of creating models (using custom observable data structures instead of regular plain-old JavaScript objects), their overarching prescriptiveness (sometimes reaching far into the structure of server-side endpoints), their vastness (most of the time forcing one to either use it for a complete application, including routing, databinding, etc. or not at all) or simply the risk/benefit ratio based on the smallish size of their contributor community usually drove me away.
So I've had to create and maintain my own micro-frameworks during most of this time and really didn't appreciate it very much. But that was before AngularJS. Angular solves the majority of the issues I had with other frameworks: it allows me to use any JavaScript-object for two-way data binding to a GUI, it concentrates only on the client and does not prescribe anything for the server, it can be used bit-by-bit if desired (say, only databinding for one complex form in an application) and it is backed by a community of contributors and advanced users who are just fantastic.
Yes, and it even provides a simple way to create domain-specific extensions for HTML which are rendered to 'real' HTML on-the fly. This might of course be extremely appealing for anyone with a XAML background ...
So Christian and I have been working with AngularJS for a while and recently decided that we'd like to share our experiences in this area. We didn't want to create videos, because John Linquist's http://egghead.io (which we've recommended to our clients time and time again) already provides really great screencasts. We also expect that our friends at Pluralsight (for presentation-style videos) will cover this area in great depth in the future.
But a paper book? No. That would definitely be too slow. Just imagine: AngularJS is currently making a major overhaul/addition to their client-side routing framework. Right now, actually. No, we could never cover these things in a book.
So we've decided to write a continuously published eBook. We're going to release individual alpha chapters throughout the next weeks at http://henriquat.re and we hope that this becomes a valuable resource for business-application developers looking into moving his experiences towards HTML5/JS-based client applications.
As a start, we've today release three main chapters:
- The Two Minute Guide to AngularJS for .NET Developers
- AngularJS Directives - Domain-Specific Extensions to HTML
- Advanced Directives - Combining AngularJS with existing Components
You can also follow us on twitter at @henriquatreJS to be notified whenever we release new content.
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