Monday, June 20, 2016

Learning Angular 2: The Journey Begins

Over the past few years, my blog posts have been few and far between.  Partly because of the pressure I'd put on myself to write very polished, very "correct" posts, which for me takes a lot of effort and energy, and partly because I know that I don't have a consistent audience...which doesn't inspire a great deal of motivation to make the effort to create the posts I'm used to writing.

So I'm going to try something a bit different.  I'm going to try writing a series of blog posts documenting my experience learning Angular 2.  When I'm learning new technology or working through a coding project, I tend to take my own "stream of consciousness" notes as I go anyway, so the plan is to write blog posts instead of notes, writing them candidly and "in the moment" as much as possible so I don't get hung up self-editing as I go.  I will undoubtedly "mislearn" (and hence mis-post) things as I go, but I need to be okay with that:  mistakes are a part of learning.  And I think, mistakes or not, my posts will be of some value to other folks trying to learn Angular 2.

I come to Angular 2 with a mix of ignorance and experience.  I've worked with JavaScript for many years, initially coding with "raw" JavaScript, and then with jQuery and jQuery UI, and eventually with Angular 1.  I"m experienced in making it do what I need it to do, but I wouldn't say I"ve ever had a deep understanding of its inner workings.  I'm comfortable coding in Angular 1, but rusty because I haven't had the opportunity to do any serious coding in it in awhile.  What code I've been writing during my day job lately has been server-side code in Groovy or Java.

I'm a bit more ignorant in the Angular 2 "companion" technologies.  I've used Grunt in some personal projects, so I have some familiarity with using a task manager as a build tool.  I've run browserify once or twice, but I'm hardly comfortable with it; I've never run webpack.  I've played with Node, so I'm familiar with npm and the notion of pulling in modules with require statements.  I took the TypeScript course on Pluralsight, so I know what the deal is there even though I haven't used it yet.

My hope is that this mix of ignorance and experience translates to blog posts that provide some value to both readers who are very new to JavaScript/client-side programming in general as well as to those readers who are already experienced (if not yet expert) client-side developers.

Anyway, enough of this introductory talk:  time to get conclude this post and start learning.

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