4 Must-Read AngularJS Blogs

Angular has gained quite a bit of popularity as an open-source Web application development framework due to its intent to simplify application development and testing.

Given its flexible nature, there are a number of approaches and best practices for incorporating Angular into your apps. Whether you're a dabbling novice or a proficient expert, here are four content-packed, super-informative AngularJS blogs we found that are worth a read.

1. Google AngularJS Blog

Heading straight to the source is a great place to start with Angular. You’ll learn more about specific tactics for developing with Angular (or AngularJS as it’s sometimes called) and stay up-to-date on the newest releases (the Angular 2.0 Beta was just announced) on the official Google AngularJS blog.

An interesting recent post from the blog is that Google will be returning the license arrangement for AngularJS to the original MIT license. As Google states, “What we've heard from users in the Angular community is that you prefer the MIT license. It's more widely used within JavaScript projects, it's shorter, and it’s better understood.”

2. Deborah’s Developer MindScape

One of the best ways to work with Angular if you work with Microsoft technologies is to use TypeScript. TypeScript is an open source programming language that's actually a superset of JavaScript. It can transpile to plain JavaScript and provides class-based object-oriented programming techniques.

Deborah Kurata, who frequently presents at the Visual Studio Live! events, agrees TypeScript works great with Angular. “If you are developing now in Angular 1.x with an eye toward Angular 2, the best thing you can do is to write your Angular code with TypeScript,” she writes in a recent blog post. “Angular 1.x code you write in TypeScript today will look very similar to code you will write in Angular 2 tomorrow.” (Click here to visit her blog and read more about her thoughts on Angular and C# development.)

3. Adrian Mejia’s Blog

Scalability is another potential issue for application development, and Angular works well there. If you’re developing with an eye toward continuous deployment or cloud platforms, this is particularly germane. Full-stack web developer Adrian Mejia, who specializes in MEAN stack (Mongodb, Expressjs, Angularjs, Nodejs), recently blogged 12 steps to take to ensure application scalability with Angular.

Visit AdrianMejia.com to learn more about this 12-step process.

4. Jason Watmore’s Blog

Another aspect of application development for which Angular is well-suited is unit testing. And that's where Jason Watmore's blog comes in.

In one of his recent posts, Watmore specified a number of libraries he uses when developing his own unit tests. Here’s a look at some of them (most of these have various alternatives and can be used in multiple combinations):

• Mocha—testing framework
• Chai—assertion library
• Sinon—spy, stub and mock library
• ngMock—module for injecting and mocking angular services

Read more about how to use these libraries in your own unit testing, along with other topics, at JasonWatmore.com.

What’s your favorite Angular blog? Got any feedback on the ones we listed here? Leave your comments below!

Posted by Lafe Low on 02/10/2016