I have spent many months this year learning Angular. More accurately I have wrestled with Angular, left to try React then decided that to get the most out of learning these frameworks I need to brush up on my vanilla JavaScript skills which I proceeded to do before finally returning to Angular. Phew!

I have used several resources to get up to speed with Angular and what I found useful and others that were not so are listed here. At the end of the post I ask for resources that have helped you learn Angular so if you don’t get that far please leave your recommendations in the comments

The good: Udemy Course

A friend recommended the Udemy course Angular – The Complete Guide by Maximilian Schwarzmüller. At the time of writing I am about half way through and it is the most enjoyable Angular resource I have found. Max is a friendly, enthusiastic teacher and the course is highly polished and easy to follow along building the sample applications and experimenting.

In addition to the discussions around language features there are lots of useful nuggets such as how to understand the opaque Angular errors that you are bound to see in your early days with the framework and the use of the browser add in Augury which is a very useful tool for debugging and profiling Angular applications.

The bad: ng-book

I have only purchased one book on Angular which was the eBook edition of the ng-book The print version was not available at the time. This is a large book running to 650+ pages. I didn’t enjoy it and only got as far as chapter 3 before giving up. Not sure why I didn’t enjoy it, perhaps I didn’t like the style or the fact that I prefer printed books? I lost patience by chapter three as the app wouldn’t work and I had no idea why. 

If you have a recommendation for an Angular book please do get in touch.   

The ugly: Official Docs

My adventures with Angular started with the Angular home page, I built the Tour of Heroes sample application and have wandered through the rest of the documentation look for other stuff to try out.

I have found the documentation to be dry and not a place that rewards you for spending much time there and so far I have had little reason to return. Problems that I encounter normally result in a Google search followed by a visit to the StackOverflow question.

Perhaps as my experience with the framework grows and I need to look things up I will be spending more time with the docs. If my opinion changes I will ensure that I update this post. 

Help needed

If you have Angular resources that you think may help me no matter how small please leave a comment.