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Ask HN: Should I learn Angular 2 in beta or wait for the full release?

10 points by destinyislands ↗ HN
I always read so much praise for Angular development but I've been sorta put off by the v1/v2 fiasco.

Now that Angular 2 is in beta it seems like the team is heading in a positive direction.

But I'm concerned the v2 beta still isn't "up-to-par", especially with educational resources for a complete beginner. Has anyone here worked with Angular & do you have any opinions on the current beta documentation?

Should I wait to learn until they release a full public v2.0 or should I just dive into the beta? How much do you think will change in the interim?

3 comments

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jordanthoms
The angular 2 beta is already in production use within Google, so I don't think it's going to change that much for the final release. It's also quite different than 1.x, so unless you are going to want to work on migrating or maintaining 1.x projects learning 1.x isn't going to help you that much.

I'm not sure how good the v2 docs are right now (haven't dived into them much yet), but I'd say you are probably best off to start learning v2 now and get a head start - Egghead.io has Angular 2 tutorials up already so you could try those. Angular 2 is looking really good, and seems to be a big improvement in performance and simplicity over the first version, so I'd recommend learning it.

mandeepj
Well, if you want to stay ahead then you should definitely get started with beta
EvanPlaice
Angular2 is looking good so far

There were a LOT of API breaking changes during alpha but that's to be expected. With the beta release, things are mostly stable. Expect a bit of a learning curve but manageable if you're up for a challenge.

You WILL need a transpiler to develop Angular2. I suggest using JSPM which provides module management, transpiler, and build creation.

AFAIK, the router is the next big task on the dev team's list. It works but they're planning to improve and expand the scope of its functionality (ex formalizing lacy loading).

Angular2/Typescript: Typescript support is really good. I don't use it personally but from what I've read, the new syntax is perfect for IDE autocomplete integration.

I highly recommend: http://www.syntaxsuccess.com/viewarticle/dependency-injectio...

The author has provided a range of working examples with the source repo hosted on GitHub. Despite all of the API changes, the code on his site has been kept up-to-date.

Angular2/ES6: If you plan to build an Angular2 app in ES6, your life is going to be a lot more difficult. Documentation is spotty at best, if you decide to use decorators you'll need to enable them in the transpiler, and translating the Typescript examples to ES6 is not exactly clear.

I haven't found any good examples online but you can check out my personal site I'm building with it. https://github.com/evanplaice/evanplaice.com

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Suggested Prereqs:

Check out System.js (ie ES6-module loader polyfill)

Watch the videos on http://jspm.io/

Learn about Zone.js, it's used for change detection https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IqtmUscE_U

Look into RxJS and observables in general if you're not familiar with them.