Single Page Web Applications with AngularJS

Go to Course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/single-page-web-apps-with-angularjs

Introduction

### Course Review: Single Page Web Applications with AngularJS on Coursera In an ever-evolving digital landscape, the ability to create dynamic and user-friendly web applications is paramount, and the **Single Page Web Applications with AngularJS** course on Coursera offers an excellent opportunity to delve into this field. Developed with the backing of Google, AngularJS is a powerful framework designed for creating rich, responsive, and maintainable web applications. This course provides a comprehensive pathway to mastering the essentials of AngularJS, specifically version 1.x. #### Course Overview The course aims to equip learners with the skills necessary to develop powerful Single Page Applications (SPAs) using AngularJS. It promises to help you write applications faster and with less code while emphasizing maintainability and testability. With the demand for AngularJS skills in the job market, this course is not just beneficial for personal growth but also for enhancing career prospects. #### Syllabus Breakdown **Module 1: Introduction to AngularJS** The course kickstarts your journey with the fundamental concepts of AngularJS. You will set up your development environment, familiarize yourself with essential resources, and learn what makes AngularJS a suitable choice for front-end development. This foundation is vital as it prepares you to understand the framework's requirements and solutions. **Module 2: Filters, Digest Cycle, Controller Inheritance, and Custom Services** This module dives into the more technical aspects of AngularJS. You'll explore filters to manipulate data, understand the critical digest cycle that facilitates data binding, grasp the importance of Prototypal Inheritance, and learn to create custom services. This module also introduces Angular directives, which are crucial for enhancing HTML functionality. The lessons are designed to build your confidence in creating more advanced applications. **Week 3: Promises, Ajax, and Custom Directives** Here, you will build upon the foundation laid in previous modules by grasping modern web development concepts like Promises and Ajax calls. You’ll learn how to use Angular’s HTTP service and deeply explore directives, which are the backbone of AngularJS functionality. This module highlights the importance of these features in building responsive applications. **Module 4: Components, Events, Modules, and Routing** As you progress, you will learn about the Component-based architecture introduced in AngularJS 1.x. This module emphasizes how to use components effectively, manage events, and organize your application into smaller, manageable modules. You’ll also delve into routing, using the ui-router module—a crucial component for developing a smooth, navigable user experience. **Module 5: Form Validation, Testing, and Restaurant Site Development** The final module caps off your journey by teaching you how to validate forms efficiently and implement unit testing for various AngularJS components. The practical aspect of this module is especially exciting, as you will reconstruct a site for a real client using AngularJS. Additionally, an optional bonus section allows learners to enhance their application further by adding features like authentication and menu updates. #### Target Audience This course is ideal for aspiring developers, web designers, and software engineers who wish to enhance their front-end development capabilities. A basic understanding of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS is recommended, but the course is structured to progressively build your skills. #### Recommendations If you are looking to upgrade your web development toolkit, **Single Page Web Applications with AngularJS** is a fantastic choice. The structured approach to learning, combined with practical applications and real-world projects, ensures you walk away with both theoretical knowledge and practical experience. Moreover, considering that AngularJS is a widely used framework, mastering these skills could dramatically improve your employability and versatility as a developer. With the potential for a significant return on investment in terms of career opportunities, this course comes highly recommended for anyone eager to jump into the world of AngularJS and modern web applications. Overall, Coursera’s **Single Page Web Applications with AngularJS** is not just a course; it’s a stepping stone towards becoming a proficient web developer in today’s tech-driven world. Don’t miss the chance to enhance your career by acquiring these valuable skills!

Syllabus

Introduction to AngularJS

In this module, we are going to start by going over how grading works for this course, will introduce some recommended books, as well as give you the information on how to find all of the source code that you will see throughout the course. We will then dive into the development environment setup for both Mac and Windows. The core of this module will be the introduction not only to the basics of AngularJS, but more importantly, the concepts that back AngularJS as a good solution for developing front-end web applications. To become a good software developer and not just with AngularJS, you will need to understand these concepts. But for becoming a good AngularJS developer, these concepts are essential, because they will allow you to understand the issues the framework is addressing and therefore get a good grasp on the solutions AngularJS is offering.

We will start this module by learning how to use Angular filters to manipulate our data into the format we want and learn how to create our own custom filters. We will then dive deep into the digest cycle, which is the process AngularJS uses to magically update our web page with the bound data from our ViewModel or the controller. Understanding this process is crucial in getting comfortable with AngularJS. We'll also see some cases where we'll need to assist that process somewhat and understand why that is. After that, we'll learn one of the most fundamental concepts in the Javascript programming language, which is Prototypal Inheritance. Clear understanding of that topic is a must before we talk about inheritance between AngularJS controllers in our application. We'll finish off the module by learning how to create our own custom Angular services as well as how to configure them. With custom Angular services we'll be able to share data across different controllers or other components in our application. We will also learn a few useful Angular directives that allow us to place looping and conditional logic direction into our HTML. You'll see that by the end of this module, you'll have the skills to create a fairly sophisticated web application that starts to use some of the more advanced software architecture techniques.

Welcome to module 3! In this module, we go over a lot of essential features of AngularJS. We will start with learning about the Promise API. While Promises are essential to Angular, this topic reaches far beyond Angular. It's really an essential topic to understanding modern web development with Javascript. We will also learn about making calls to the server through the built in Angular service called the HTTP service. We'll finish off the module by spending a considerable amount of time on THE crown feature of AngularJS: directives. Directives are really at the core of the entire framework. They not only allow us to extend the functionality of existing HTML elements, which is already pretty amazing in an of itself, but they also allow us to create our own element with custom view and custom behavior. Pretty exciting stuff!

In this module, we start by introducing the idea of Component-based architecture. We will then delve into the AngularJS component API. The component API is something that was just recently added into Angular 1 and it's not only supposed to improve your application through the use of Component-based architecture, but also prepare you for an upgrade to Angular version 2, which uses components almost exclusively. We will then learn about the AngularJS event system and how to split up our application into smaller modules that can then be glued together to produce our final application. We'll finish off the module by diving fairly deep into Routing between views in your application and, specifically, into the use of the ui-router module, which is one of the most popular open source routing solutions within the AngularJS ecosystem. In fact, it's so popular that even the main Google documentation for routing in Angular links to ui-router. Routing is a very important topic. Without it, your Single Page Application is stuck displaying just 1 view, without an elegant way to display other views.

Welcome to module 5! This is the last module in the course. We'll start this module by learning just how easy it is to validate forms with Angular. We will then delve into unit testing our AngularJS code. We will go over how to set up tests for every type of major Angular artifact: controller, service, directive, and component, as well as how to test services that access the network through the HTTP service. However, the last part of the module is the most fun. We will take the site that was developed for our real client in my previous course and re-write the entire thing using AngularJS. However, the coding fun doesn't have to stop there. After you finish the required part of the course, you can move on to the optional bonus part where we take our newly developed AngularJS application and enhance with it even more features that will allow the restaurant owners to administer their own data. We'll go over setting up authentication, editing restaurant menu items, uploading menu item pictures and so on.