Michael Bester

In recent months, I’ve worked on a few different projects which utilize AngularJS as their foundation upon which to build. The first one ended up being highly complex—and is still ongoing—and I was totally unfamiliar with utilizing Angular, or even how to think about using it effectively. Previously, my application programming experience centered on DOM manipulation, AJAX requests, callbacks and server side templates—not always utilizing jQuery specifically, but doing the kind of things that jQuery excels at. Coming from that mindset, it was a real struggle to get comfortable with Angular and begin to find my legs with it.

Through tutorials, trial and error, as well as dogged persistence, I eventually did find a level of ease and familiarity with Angular, but I wish I had found this Stack Overflow answer while I was learning the basics. One choice cut:

First know that single-page applications are applications. They’re not webpages. So we need to think like a server-side developer in addition to thinking like a client-side developer.

If you’re comfortable with jQuery, but you’re interested in learning Angular as well, go read the whole post. It’ll be well worth it.