How to learn Angular 2 straight up in 2020

It’s a perfect time to learn Angular 2: it’s highly valued by big corporations (even developed by the biggest of them all), it’s here to stay and about to get rid of its major downside.

What is Angular

Angular 2 (we’ll get to that number in a second) is a JavaScript framework which has everything included (like routing) so you don’t need third party packages or tools like you’ll need with popular JavaScript libraries React and Vue.

It started out as AngularJS and was rewritten by the development team to implement the component based architecture which was made popular by React at that time. This rewritten version was named Angular 2 and the number climbs up with each new release every 6 months (currently Angular 8).

Biggest advantages of Angular 2:

• developed by Google, so it’s not going anywhere
• it’s a framework (not a library) so the same team keeps all modules up to date and compatible with every release
• very highly valued in large enterprises for its longevity and update-simplicity
• easily backwards-compatible (almost same syntax between Angular 2 and Angular 8)

Downside of Angular 2:

• larger project size in comparison to React and Vue. The Google Angular development team is actively working on tackling this problem with the upcoming release with its new rendering engine Ivy.

How to learn Angular as beginner, intermediate and master

For me learning is about the journey as much as about efficiency. So I like to learn new things and I like to learn them in a reasonable amount of time. To do this I think you need a goal. So no matter at what level you are in regards to Angular set yourself a concrete goal like finishing two projects for your portfolio or making a prototype for a new tool at your work.

The next step is applying more to beginners and asks you to commit to one thing: don’t learn from start to finish! Sounds counterintuitive, but what I mean by that is don’t get held up by finishing a book or an online course step after step from start to finish. In order to learn as efficiently as possible you need to get coding yourself right from the start. So pick a project, write down all the features and then start to read or watch the chapters you need to learn in order to finish each feature.

Beginners

Start by watching a crash course about Angluar 2 on YouTube like the one by Brad Traversy.

Read up on HTML, CSS and very basic JavaScript so you know how they play together and what each of them does. A very good resource for that is the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN).

Then finish the official tutorial Tour of Heroes. Google whenever something is not clear to you.

Now that you understand a bit more about how Angular works pick a project and try finishing it next to an online course at Udemy.

Get feedback in online communities or from your colleagues/friends.

Find other projects to finish and before you know it you have a nice little portfolio.

Intermediate

Here I think it’s fair to assume that you do know at least the basics of Angular (and HTML, CSS, JavaScript). I would put myself into this group as well, so here is advice put together from my own next-steps-list 🙂

Create larger projects with backends (like PHP or NodeJS).

Try to teach Angular to a friend or colleague and read/watch up on those topics you struggle with. There are great tutorials on YouTube, which cover smaller projects which you could put together to one large one.

Create content about Angular (like a blog) and get involved with the community by joining discord channels or posting on forums and Stack Overflow (this will also make a nice impression when applying for a new job).

Master

As you are a master of Angular 2 you know how to code programs and sites and you should know where to look up stuff on the fly if you are stuck.

I think masters would benefit the most from looking into the live environment of Angular like the MEAN stack.

Try to find new use cases like using Angular for prototyping.

Create lectures/courses and position yourself as an expert in the community.

Get very good at all parts of JavaScript.

Wrapping up

So that concludes my list of recommendations and now I’d like to read yours: What do you think is the best way to learn Angular 2 in 2020?

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