Last Updated on February 20, 2024 by Aram
This is an in-depth review for the book titled: Angular Cookbook.
Presenting to you a new book in the world of the modern web development:
Angular Cookbook
Over 80 actionable recipes every Angular developer should know about
The Second Edition
By Muhammad Ahsan Ayaz
A Google developer expert (GDE) in Angular, Muhammad is a highly skilled Software Architect and a trainer with generous contributions to the open-source community.
As the book name implies, all code examples in the book are presented as cooking recipes; That’s it, before you cook any Angular meal, you need to understand what are the requirements ingredients and how to combine all the different items together to make your cooked code pass the tasting tests.
Key Topics Covered
Here are details on the key topics that are covered in Angular Cookbook:
You will learn how Angular components communicate and share data between each other through several ways and between the parent and child components as well as between siblings.
The book will teach you an essential topic in Angular, the Angular Directives.
You will learn how to use the Angular directives and how to build your own ones. You will find several examples that show you how to build directives to manipulate the elements of DOM.
Dependency Injection is thoughtfully covered and backed with examples using services and providers; How Angular uses DI and how dependencies are injected into components, directives and services.
One topic that is rarely covered in many Angular learning resources but is generously explained here is the Angular Animations, there is a complete chapter covering the different concepts and types of animations in Angular.
Personally, I believe RxJS is the most interesting and important library that every Angular app should include, and every Angular developer should have a good understanding of it.
This book provides deep insights on using RxJS for your Angular app to sync data to/from HTTP API, implement the observer pattern with observables and observers, use the streams feature and many more.
You will get the chance to learn about the different RxJS operators and also you will build a new custom one.
Also a very important topic in the world of programming, especially web or mobile, is the state management. How do you manage the state of each UI component that is responsible to display dynamic data or appear in a particular state.
This book greatly covers this topic with the Angular Reactive Extensions NgRx
Routing and navigation are core topics in Angular that are covered quite well in this book. You will learn how to secure your routes with route guards and configure listeners and actions for route changes.
Another core topic is the Angular forms, you will learn about the 2 approaches to handle user input: the template-driven and reactive forms. The author delves into both approaches with validations and complex scenarios
Next is the Angular Component Dev Kit (CDK), you will learn how to utilize this amazing library to either use a common UI component in your app or to help you build your customized component. The components built by CDK comply with the Material Design Specifications.
Unit testing your components, services and pipes will become much easier after you read the complete chapter on how to write unit tests in Angular with Jest. You will also learn how to mock the dependencies, child components and directives.
Staying with the testing topic, but this time it will be about applying End-to-End (E2E) Tests in Angular with Cypress.
Including this type of tests in your Angular application gives you more confidence in your code and how it will behave with the different integration parts.
Because performance is a critical area when building modern web applications, this book dedicates a chapter to help you learn how to analyze, optimize and improve your Angular App performance.
You will see how you can convert your existing Angular app into a progressively enhanced web applications (PWA) using the Angular CLI.
Angular has built-in support for PWA, which allows you to build robust and resilient modern web apps that takes a lot from the native mobile app experience.
This book targets mid-level Angular developers who already have some experience and knowledge in this technology.
Final Thoughts
Personally, I think even if someone has just started with the tour of heroes tutorials provided by the official website of Angular, this book would still be a great continuation to help you better understand the different building blocks, concepts and some advanced topics in Angular.
You will never get bored reading this book with the prevalent downloadable code examples, the widespread explanatory screenshots, illustrative diagrams and tips in each and every chapter.
And you are never left behind, as this book code examples are built with Angular 17, the latest active version.
If you are a front-end developer working with Angular or just started learning it, I totally recommend you getting this Angular cookbook.
It covers all the different concepts and topics that help you build enterprise-grade Angular applications using the best practices and latest Angular language updates.
It will be your stepping stone in your journey to become a top Angular chef in the modern web development cuisine.
Helpful Resources
If you are a full-stack developer using .NET and Angular, then this tutorial should be helpful for you:
Secure Angular Site using JWT Authentication with ASP.NET Core Web API
Bonus
The time you spend reading a book is one of the most redeeming experiences anyone might get, combine with a musical masterpiece and feel your spirit uprising to different worlds.
One of my most favourite baroque masterpieces: