It’s difficult sometimes to wade through the numerous languages, platforms, frameworks, apps, tools, and other items presented in the ever-changing world of application development and information technology operations. Job seekers who aspire to have a fulfilling career in fields such as Programming and DevOps find themselves overwhelmed at all of the choices. What languages should you learn? What applications and tools should you become familiar with?
This article hopes to remove at least a little bit of uncertainty by focusing on Angular and showing what it is and why it’s a good thing to learn. Whether you want to take your career in a different direction or simply upskill your knowledge base to improve your value in your current job, you should seriously consider learning Angular.
What is Angular?
Let’s start with the fundamentals of what Angular is. In order to effectively answer this, where better to begin than with a quote from the platform’s actual creators? According to the platform website “Angular is a platform that makes it easy to build applications with the web. Angular combines declarative templates, dependency injection, end to end tooling, and integrated best practices to solve development challenges. Angular empowers developers to build applications that live on the web, mobile, or desktop.”
All told, Angular is an open-source front-end web application framework, primarily sustained by Google as well as an extended community of people and companies. It is fully extensible and also functions well with other libraries.
What is AngularJS About? How is it Different From Angular?
No conversation about Angular is complete without touching upon AngularJS. You may have heard it used in reference to different Angular versions. The term “AngularJS” is used for any version 1.x of Angular. Just to let you know how far back that is, Angular version 7 was released in mid-October of 2018, and version 8 is slated to be released by April of this year.
The biggest difference between AngularJS and other versions is that the former uses JavaScript while the latter use TypeScript (hence the “JS” in the former’s name!). AngularJS also has a steep learning curve and is more complicated than its successors. While it’s still around, it’s been outpaced by other frameworks as well as subsequent Angular versions.
In fact, over the last few years, AngulaJS has lost ground to ReactJS as the framework of choice among JavaScript developers. That’s why if you want to learn Angular, it’s a good idea to tackle the most recent iteration. If you’re already familiar with AngularJS, then it’s time to upskill and take your knowledge to the next level. Best to move on!
If you’re wondering why you should learn Angular, then maybe you should ask yourself this key question…
Who Uses Angular?
So who’s using Angular, anyway? Is it really worth it? What percentage of programmers are using Angular? And who’s coming up with all of these questions?
Well, for starters, as of 2017, companies that used Angular to build their websites include Google, PayPal, Nike, HBO, General Motors, Sony, The Guardian, and Upwork. That’s one heck of a lineup! And if that’s not enough, there are more websites using Angular.
Furthermore, according to the following usage statistics, Angular enjoys widespread popularity among developers, especially on high-traffic sites.
Benefits of Learning Angular
There’s a lot of platforms and tools out there, so what makes Angular so special? What sort of advantages does it bring to the table, that it’s so important for developers to know its ins and outs? Here are some of Angular’s most impressive advantages:
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Less Coding
The best code is short but effective, getting the most functionality with expending the least effort. Fortunately, Angular supports Model View Controlling architecture (MVC). All the developer needs to do is split their code to fit into the MVC architecture, and Angular takes care of the rest! No worries about having to do the MVC pipeline. -
Ease of Integration
There’s a host of frameworks out there that have Angular already built into them, including Kendo UI, Wijmo, and Ionic, to name a few. That just goes to show that Angular plays well with others. -
Single Page Applications Supported
A Single Page Applications is defined as a web application that loads a single HTML page. The page is then updated dynamically according to the users’ interaction with the web app. Single Page Applications, or SPAs for short, can communicate with the back-end servers without having to refresh the full webpage for the purposes of loading data in the application. No one likes waiting too long for a full webpage to reload, so SPAs are able to provide better user experience by reducing load times. -
Angular Uses a Declarative User Interface
Angular uses HTML, and that’s an important point. When it comes to defining an application’s user interface, HTML is the best choice. HTML is an intuitive and declarative language and is not as complex as JavaScript.
The presentational logic is separated from the imperative logic when you’re using a declarative user interface. That means that program flow and component loading order on the webpage are non-issues. Just define the page’s layout, define where the data is being bound and what it is being bound to, and relax. Angular will take it from there, much as it does with coding. -
Angular Gives You Modularity
When it comes to modularity in the specific context of Angular, you should think of the code as being organized into “buckets”, except that with Angular, the buckets are known as “modules”. A module holds related components, directives, pipes, and collected services, and groups of these reusable modules store the application’s code. Additionally, these modules can be combined with one another for the purposes of creating an entire application. This method of app creation offers several valuable advantages. For instance, it lets a program perform lazy-loading, where one or more application features are loaded on demand. Intelligent use of lazy-loading will dramatically increase an application’s efficiency.
The advantage of modularity becomes even more crucial when you bear in mind that enterprise applications are prone to grow very large. Increased app size poses a challenge to the division of labor across multiple teams, and that kind of challenge can create problems with collaboration. But by using modules, the code is kept organized and therefore the division of labor is done properly and easily, all the while maintaining code consistency.
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Cross-Platform Versatility
And now we come to the final point. There are so many choices of platforms out there, so it stands to reason that a framework that can accommodate any of the needed app types is a framework worth knowing. Angular can make applications for:
Desktop Applications
Angular creates desktop-installed applications for Mac, Windows, and Linux. That pretty much covers the important platforms.
Angular is well-suited for web development. In fact, for Angular versions five and higher, you can also develop progressive web applications. Progressive web applications are characterized by high performance and working offline as well.
Web Applications
Smartphone apps coded in a specific programming language (e.g. Objective C for iOS or Java for Android) are called native mobile applications and yes, Angular can tackle them as well.
Native Mobile Applications
So with all of these advantages, it becomes clear that developers and programmers can benefit greatly from learning how to use Angular. At this point, it’s clear that if you want to remain competitive in today’s job market, you should learn Angular. Which leads us to…
How to Learn Angular?
Whether you’re a developer or programmer who wants to upskill, or you’re looking to launch yourself into a better career, learning Angular is an important step. So how does one go about doing this?
Simplilearn’s Angular Training Course enables you to master front-end web development with Angular. It helps you gain in-depth knowledge of concepts such as TypeScript, Bootstrap Grid System, Dependency Injections, SPA (Single Page Application), Directives, Forms, Pipes, Promises, Observables, and understand the testing of the Angular class.
Whether you choose to do Self-Paced Learning, Online Classroom Flexi-Pass, or a Corporate Training Solution, you will get 36 hours of instructor-led online training, free downloadable e-book, a dozen quizzes, and three industry-based projects.
Once you unlock your certificate, you will show a prospective employer that you have what it takes to handle any position that requires a working knowledge of Angular. According to Indeed, Angular developer positions can pull around $72,350 to $128,227 per year on average.
So what are you waiting for? Learning Angular can open new doors to a new career, and if you’re already comfortably situated in a good position, it never hurts to increase your value by indulging in a little upskilling.
