Course Introduction

Let’s introduce the course approach and description.

We'll cover the following

Course objectives

This course covers modern web development and automated testing using the Angular framework. It is not an introduction to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, or design

Course focus

We’ll be focusing primarily on the development side of front-end development. That’s why we’re resorting to other frameworks such as Bootstrap2 to handle the styling of our website. The Bootstrap (or an equivalent) framework tool is used in nearly every development job, so learning the basics along the way is valuable knowledge that you’re likely to use again at some point in your career.

We’ll also be working with Git3. To host the code that we manage with Git, we’ll be using GitHub4. Once again, these are tools used by most teams of developers that you can expect to use in the future. We’ll only cover the basics of these two tools.

The approach

The goal is to simulate the experience of real-world front-end development with Angular. Often when learning a front-end framework, tutorials leave out essential parts of code. In these cases, an API is typically substituted with hard-coded data. A functional application would be built with all the code in a single file with a disclaimer near the end stating, “This isn’t how you’d do it in real life.” As this practice can be frustrating for the learner, we will avoid it in this course.

In this course, you’ll be:

  • Provided with the Angular application’s API as a code repository.

  • Shown installation, tooling setup, database setup, and so on, until you have a working API.

  • Introduced to the Angular application API’s documentation and design specs.

  • Building an Angular application from scratch with a heavy emphasis on automated testing.

This process isn’t unlike one you may expect to see at your first job as a front-end developer where a separate team would be responsible for developing the API. In this case, you’re also responsible for consuming the code as well.