The Top Books For Learning Angular
The books listed below might specifically state they are for Angular 2. However due to semantic versioning these will still be relevant if you are working with Angular 4+
In this article we’ll be covering some of the best books you can buy if you are wanting to learn the intricacies of the Angular framework. If you have been following my site for a while you’ll know I am a huge advocate for the Angular framework. I was introduced to the world of AngularJS in my first position at my current company and I’ve gone on to specialize in frontend design and development using both the original AngularJS and Angular 2+.
Throughout my time using the framework I have had the pleasure of reading multiple books, articles and tutorials covering the framework and I thought I would share with you my list of favorite books.
Angular 2 Cookbook
The second edition of the Angular 2 Cookbook by Matt Frisbie is a top-class book to buy if you are looking to learn the Angular framework. The book follows a cookbook approach with each recipe building upon knowledge gained from previous recipes and by the end of the book you should be a top-class Angular expert able to write highly performant code that follows current industry standards.
It features around 70 extensive examples all showcasing different aspects of the Angular framework, each one a step-by-step guide that fully explain everything as you go along.
Overall if you could only buy one book on Angular then this should be it. I thoroughly enjoyed working through the book and I’d definitely recommend it to others.
Covers
- Migrating Angular 1 Applications to Angular 2
- The fundamentals of Angular
- Writing Performant Applications
- The best practices for writing Angular applications.
Angular 2 By Example
Angular 2 by Example does a fantastic job of teaching you the basics of the Angular framework through a range of interesting coding examples. The first few chapters cover the Angular essentials such as the design of the framework and why the decision was made to go with TypeScript. It then guides you through the creation of a 7 minute workout app which does an excellent job of covering components.
Throughout the rest of the book we are walked through building more and more advanced Angular applications whilst constantly being introduced to more and more Angular concepts. By the end of the book you should have an excellent handle of what it takes to build Angular applications and following best practices whilst you do so.
I’d highly recommend this book to anyone willing to learn the Angular framework.
ASP.NET Core and Angular 2
ASP.NET Core and Angular 2 does a fantastic job of introducing Angular 2 to ASP.NET developers and showing them how they can build single page applications in conjunction with an ASP.NET core.
ng-book: The Complete Guide to Angular 4
ng-book : The Complete Guide to Angular 4 does an excellent job of providing a number of high quality examples of how you can write solid Angular 4 code. From the reviews it has received so far it has been relatively well received and has obtained an average of 3.7/5 at the time of writing this.
Angular Test-Driven Development
Angular Test-Driven development focuses on how the testing strategies you should follow when building Angular applications. It covers in details things such as Karma for your unit-testing needs and the likes of Protractor for your end-to-end purposes.
It also goes into detail how to set up your project to work seamlessly with Travis-CI so that you can automatically keep up to date with the state of all of your builds within your Angular app. Overall it’s a good complementary book that would go well with some of the other books on offer in this list. Testing is an often neglected part of front-end development but having a decent foundation on how to construct your testing frameworks is necessary if you are building enterprise level applications using Angular.
Pro Angular
The second edition of Pro Angular by Adam Freeman goes into detail on topics such as the MVC pattern.
The book has been well received and is definitely an excellent choice if you have to buy just one Angular book.
Learning TypeScript
The Angular framework is built using TypeScript and having a solid foundation in this language is important. In this section we’ll be looking at books that focus purely on learning the TypeScript programming language.
Pro TypeScript: Application-Scale JavaScript Development
Whilst this book may not be focused on Angular, it's an incredible learning aide for someone who is new to the language and the framework. During my time working with the framework I've seen developers, myself included, who have struggled with issues that aren't Angular-centric that could have been solved if our underlying knowledge of the TypeScript language was stronger.
This book guides you through the language and brings you up to speed with everything you need in order to develop high quality TypeScript applications.