Angular 2 Fundamentals - The Coolest Course In Existence
Written by Nikos Vaggalis
Monday, 05 September 2016
This has to be one of the most interesting online courses I've ever come across, mainly down to the instructor's hip and fast talking sprinkled with the right amount of "yo's" and "hey's" that make it distinct.
This doesn't suggest anything about its nature. however. It just happens that the instructor. besides being super confident in his craft and technology stack, clearly demonstrated in the video-based sessions,is also being cool!
Now on the course itself, it's so hands-on that it becomes overwhelming. Looking through an Angular 2 lens it takes students through the basics, like components and selectors, services and state management, routing and authentication, by building a Google Keep clone from scratch.
It certainly sounds promising, so with that in mind let's look into what each session covers:
Components... Components... Components... details the difference between the Container and UI Components
Show some notes and Create some notes is where the layout of our app is initially set by creating the basic Notepad container, styling and enhancing it in the rest of the chapter's sessions.
At this point it should be noted that in order to follow along, each student should port the class's code from GitHub and setup the relevant environment, nodejs, editor, styles, Typescript plugins etc.This is an area that it's not covered in enough detail, something that led to a lot of misconfiguration issues, evident in the students' comments scattered around the message boards for the class.
HTTP, Routing, and Services "we want to interact with an API instead of static data" and "create our service to interact with an API" adding "DI" into the mix, are statements that leave a lot to be desired and once more highlight the issue with this course. It is one thing to be a master of your craft and another to be able to convey it.
The instructor clearly evident of the former is also guilty of the latter, talking and moving too fast for a beginner to be able to understand.
This bears a two-fold consequence. First to follow along you have to either be a native US speaker or in full command of your English. Second the terms and concepts are just outlined and never satisfactory explained, with more emphasis given to the coding aspect itself, than on the teaching.
Nevertheless the aforementioned chapter, together with the Lock it down and State management ones, go through adding authentication to routing, exposing routes and redirecting non authenticated users, handling state, building sign-in forms etc, as such fully encapsulating an important lifecycle of the application.
The last chapter Don't forget some tests is on testing with Typescript and Webpack.
Summing up, I have mixed feelings. The teaching style is more close to 'live coding' and 'hacking along', than to the classic paradigm we are accustomed to expect of courses targeting beginners, that is, slow in pace and looking into the concepts in much more detail. To do justice to an otherwise well structured and feature complete course attention needs to be paid to adding adequate explanation.
That doesn't mean that it's of no use, however. Quite the contrary I should say but I think that the target group should shift to programmers already exposed to Angular and in need of code mentorship, who want to progress their coding by watching a pro and by peeking into the capabilities and advanced functionality hidden within the framework.
If you're total newbie, however, I wouldn't recommend it to you as it will scare you and put you off. It's true that participants in this course are prompted to complete the Modern Javascript development one first, in order to get their feet wet and go through the basics. That however won't anyway any difference if the issues brought up here are not addressed. One thing is for certain Angular 2 Fundamentals won't bore you in any instance, but instead will keep you fully entertained, courtesy of the coolest, probably, instructor in existence!
The holiday season is a good time to learn about computers - you have the time. But where to start? Our advice is to ignore the pudding and go for a Pi.
