Chapter 1, Angular’s Architecture and Concepts, introduces Angular as a mature platform for building sophisticated, high-performance web applications using TypeScript, RxJS, and NgRx. It introduces key concepts like reactive programming, the Flux pattern, standalone components, fine-grained reactivity with Signals, and the importance of keeping Angular updated.
Chapter 2, Forms, Observables, Signals, and Subjects, covers creating search functionality, using forms, enabling interaction between components, avoiding memory leaks, comparing imperative and reactive programming, chaining API calls, using signals for better performance, and building a small weather application to demonstrate basic Angular concepts.
Chapter 3, Architecting an Enterprise App, covers best practices and considerations for succeeding as a technical lead or architect on an enterprise Angular project, including ingredients for running a successful project, why Angular suits enterprise needs, performance optimization tools and techniques like the 80-20 rule and Router-first architecture, and agile planning with Kanban boards.
Chapter 4, Creating a Router-First Line-of-Business App, covers using the Angular CLI to generate project scaffolding and components, implementing branding and icons, debugging routers with DevTools, and the core tenets of router-first architecture – defining roles early, lazy loading, walking skeleton navigation, designing around data entities, completing high-level UX design, achieving stateless and decoupled components, differentiating controls and components, and maximizing code reuse with TypeScript/ECMAScript.
Chapter 5, Designing Authentication and Authorization, covers implementing token-based authentication with JWTs using TypeScript for safe data handling, building extendable services with OOP principles like inheritance and abstract classes, the fundamentals of caching and HTTP interceptors to preserve login state, and an in-memory authentication service for testing. The key topics are building secure authentication and authorization services and applying SOLID principles to make them extensible.
Chapter 6, Implementing Role-Based Navigation, covers designing conditional navigation experiences, creating reusable UI services for alerts, using route guards to control access, emphasizing server-side security, dynamically providing different auth providers based on environment, and implementing authentication with Firebase.
Chapter 7, Working with REST and GraphQL APIs, covers full-stack architecture using the MEAN stack – building a Node.js server with TypeScript, containerization with Docker, infrastructure as code with Docker Compose, CI/CD verification, designing REST APIs with OpenAPI and GraphQL with Apollo, implementing JWT authentication and RBAC middleware in Express, and building custom authentication providers in Angular using HttpClient and Apollo. The key topics are full-stack development, API design, RBAC, and end-to-end authentication.
Chapter 8, Recipes – Reusability, Forms, and Caching, covers building reusable forms, directives and user controls in Angular, including multi-step responsive forms, removing boilerplate code through inheritance and abstraction, dynamic form elements like date pickers, typeahead, and form arrays, interactive controls with input masking and custom components, seamless integration via ControlValueAccessor, and scaling form complexity linearly by extracting sections – as well as layout techniques like grid lists. The key topics are reusable, dynamic, and interactive form building blocks.
Chapter 9, Recipes – Master/Detail, Data Tables, and NgRx, completes coverage of major Angular application design considerations using router-first architecture and recipes to implement a line-of-business application, including editing users, resolving route data, reusing components, building master/detail views and data tables, implementing state management with NgRx or SignalStore, comparing state management options like NgRx Data, ComponentStore, Signals, Akita, and Elf, adding preload animations and global spinners, and previewing Angular’s signal-based future by refactoring an application to use SignalStore.
Chapter 10, Releasing to Production with CI/CD, covers implementing continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines, emphasizing automated testing to enable rapid delivery in enterprises, configuring CI with CircleCI, enforcing quality gates with trunk-based development using GitHub flow, deploying to Vercel and Firebase, infrastructure as code techniques with Docker and NPM scripts, containerization and deployment to Google Cloud Run, gated CI workflows, CircleCI orchestration with workflows and orbs, code coverage metrics, and automated deployments to enable continuous delivery – allowing the rapid iteration and sharing of app builds.
Appendix A, Setting Up Your Development Environment, wraps things up with setting up efficient Angular development environments using CLI tools for automation and consistency across Windows and macOS, creating an initial Angular project, optimizing VS Code configuration, implementing automated linting and fixing for coding standard enforcement and error catching, documenting team norms through scripts, and how standardized environments and coding styles boost team productivity and troubleshooting.
