The idea behind writing this book was to provide a guide and a higher perspective of applications built using the MEAN stack. As I interact with lots of people at the company Evozon, where I'm working, I see a big desire in people to touch and feel how applications are built using different technology stacks.

Especially in popular technologies such as JavaScript, Node.js, and MongoDB. But usually, finding full end-to-end example applications is hard. Don't get me wrong; the Internet is full of great stuff, brilliant people, and so many mind-blowing things, but it is also full of noise and uncertainty, and it's hard to know which path is right or wrong and what should be done in certain scenarios.

That's why we want to showcase different scenarios of building applications using the MEAN stack. Probably it's not the only way of doing things, but it should provide you with a starting point, or give you an insight into how certain parts of an app are built.

This is not a getting started book on Node.js and Angular 2. It will jump right into action and showcase six built-from-the-beginning applications, each with different use cases and solving a high-level problem.

Writing a book takes time, a lot of energy, and a little bit of fear. I've feared that I'll never finish this book. It was a long run, and the funniest part was that the first three chapters were written in an earlier version of AngularJS. Don't worry! Everything is shipped using Angular 2.

As you might have guessed, we had a long run and rewrote everything using the currently-in-beta-release Angular 2. Why? Because, as I told you before, we want to push our limits. We want to grow and master new ways of building modern applications.

I've tried to cover a variety of applications built using the MEAN stack, ranging from a simple contact manager and a real-time chat application to a full auction website.

Chapter 1, Contact Manager, will cover the process of building an introductory application to save your contacts in MondoDB. The chapter will introduce you to TDD (short for Test-Driven Development) for your Node.js application. You will learn how to build an Angular 2 app that will access data from the Express API.

Chapter 2, Expense Tracker, is going to dive deep into working with monetary data in JavaScript and storing this data in MongoDB using the exact precision approach. Also, you are going to learn how to add a token for authentication of each request in the client application by extending the built-in HTTP service in Angular. Besides this, you'll see how to use the aggregation framework from MongoDB and display the result in your Angular application.

Chapter 3, Job Board, will focus on building a more consumer-level application that will enable users to define a custom profile with dynamic data. You will use reactive extensions in Angular to create different communication layers in your application. On the backend, we are going to build a RESTful API using Node.js and set up a boilerplate application from the previously built apps that we are going to use further in the book.

Chapter 4, Chat Application, will start reusing the boilerplate built in the previous chapter. But the most fun part will begin when we create a chat service layer that uses SocketIO. This will enable both the backend and the frontend Angular app to communicate in real time to send messages. The chat service will be built in such a way that it's easily extendable with new modules, besides instant messaging, such as when a user is online or goes offline.

Chapter 5, E-Commerce Application, is going to reflect the ease of storing unstructured data in MongoDB. We'll discuss in detail how to store your product catalog in a NoSQL database. Besides this, our initial architecture from the previous chapters is going to get a new form, and we'll experiment with micro-apps, each with its own responsibility. The micro-apps will use the core e-commerce module that encapsulates all the business logic. Also, this chapter will cover two client apps, one built with a totally different technology, and an admin application using Angular 2.

Chapter 6, Auction Application, is going to be more of an extension of the previous chapter; in other words, it will use the e-commerce API to fetch product information and authenticate users. This will push us not only to reuse existing code but rely on other services for faster prototyping when building products. Also, we are going to dive deeper into RxJs and see how we can build a real-time bidding system in our Angular auction application using SocketIO on the server side.

You will require any modern web browser (such as Chrome's latest version or IE 10+), the Node.js platform installed on your machine, and version 3.2 or higher of MongoDB. Optionally, you can install any web server, such as Nginx, Apache, IIS, or lighttpd, to proxy requests to your Node.js application.

If you are a web developer with a basic understanding of the MEAN stack, experience of developing applications with JavaScript, and basic experience with NoSQL databases, then this book is for you.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles 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: "Create a file called app/models/token.js."

A block of code is set as follows:

'use strict';

const LEN = 256;
const SALT_LEN = 64;
const ITERATIONS = 10000;
const DIGEST = 'sha256';
const crypto = require('crypto');

module.exports.hash = hashPassword;
module.exports.verify = verify;

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

require('./config/express').init(app);
require('./config/routes').init(app);

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

  Authentication
    Basic authentication
      √ should authenticate a user and return a new token
      √ should not authenticate a user with invalid credentials
  2 passing

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "It triggers an event when the Save button is clicked on and the form is submitted."

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