Chapter 1, Maximizing AngularJS Directives, dissects the various components of directives and demonstrates how to wield them in your applications. Directives are the bread and butter of AngularJS, and the tools presented in this chapter will maximize your ability to take advantage of their extensibility.

Chapter 2, Expanding Your Toolkit with Filters and Service Types, covers two major tools for code abstraction in your application. Filters are an important pipeline between the model and its appearance in the view, and are essential tools for managing data presentation. Services act as broadly applicable houses for dependency-injectable modules and resource access.

Chapter 3, AngularJS Animations, offers a collection of recipes that demonstrate various ways to effectively incorporate animations into your application. Additionally, it will dive deep down into the internals of animations in order to give you a complete perspective on how everything really works under the hood.

Chapter 4, Sculpting and Organizing Your Application, gives you strategies for controlling the application initialization, organizing your files and modules, and managing your template delivery.

Chapter 5, Working with the Scope and Model, breaks open the various components involving ngModel and provides details of the ways in which they can integrate into your application flow.

Chapter 6, Testing in AngularJS, gives you all the pieces you need to jump into writing test-driven applications. It demonstrates how to configure a fully operational testing environment, how to organize your test files and modules, and everything involved in creating a suite of unit and E2E tests.

Chapter 7, Screaming Fast AngularJS, is a response to anyone who has ever complained about AngularJS being slow. The recipes in this chapter give you all the tools you need to tune all aspects of your application's performance and take it from a steam engine to a bullet train.

Chapter 8, Promises, breaks apart the asynchronous program flow construct, exposes its internals, then builds it all the way back up to discuss strategies for your application's integration. This chapter also demonstrates how promises can and should integrate into your application's routing and resource access utilities.

Chapter 9, What's New in AngularJS 1.3, goes through how your application can integrate the slew of new features and changes that were introduced in the AngularJS 1.3 and the later AngularJS 1.2.x releases.

Chapter 10, AngularJS Hacks, is a collection of clever and interesting strategies that you can use to stretch the boundaries of AngularJS's organization and performance.

Almost every example in this book has been added to JSFiddle, with the links provided in the text. This allows you to merely visit a URL in order to test and modify the code with no setup of any kind, on any major browser and on any major operating system. If you want to replicate an example outside of JSFiddle, all the external content (AngularJS, AngularJS modules, third-party libraries and modules) is served from https://code.angularjs.org/ and https://cdnjs.com/.

Chapter 6, Testing in AngularJS, involves setting up a testing framework, which should be able to be accomplished on any major Unix-based operating system (OS X and, Linux). The test suite is built on top of Grunt, Karma, Selenium, and Protractor; all of these and their dependencies can be installed through npm.

There are already plenty of introductory resources to guide a green developer into the thick of AngularJS. This cookbook is for developers with at least basic knowledge of JavaScript and AngularJS, and who are looking to expand their perspective on the framework.

The goal of this text is to have you walk away from reading about an AngularJS concept armed with a solid understanding of how it works, insight into the best ways to wield it in real-world applications, and annotated code examples to get you started.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "By cleverly using directives and the $compile service, this exact directive functionality is possible."

A block of code is set as follows:

(index.html)

<!-- specify root element of application -->
<div ng-app="myApp">
  <!-- register 'my-template.html' with $templateCache -->
  <script type="text/ng-template" id="my-template.html">
    <div ng-repeat="num in [1,2,3,4,5]">{{ num }}</div>
  </script>  
  
  <!-- your custom element -->
  <my-directive></my-directive>
</div>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

(app.js)

.directive('iso', function () {
  return {
    scope: {}
  };
});

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

npm install protractor grunt-protractor-runner --save-dev

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The following directive will display NW, NE, SW, or SE depending on where the cursor is relative to it."

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