This book is up to date for the 2.4 release and is compatible through the 4.0 release as well, and it does not have any code based on the beta or release candidates.

Chapter 1, Strategies for Upgrading to Angular 2, is an overview of a number of ways to migrate an Angular 1 application to Angular 2. Although there is no one-size-fits-all upgrade strategy, you will find that these recipes demonstrate some ways that will allow you to preserve a large amount of your existing Angular 1 code base.

Chapter 2, Conquering Components and Directives, gives a broad and deep set of examples involving what Angular 2 components are and how to use them. Angular 2 applications are built entirely of components, and this chapter offers you a total rundown of their role.

Chapter 3, Building Template-Driven and Reactive Forms, covers the reworked Angular 2 form modules. Angular 2 offers you two primary styles of erecting form features, and this chapter covers both of them in depth.

Chapter 4, Mastering Promises, shows how the Promise object has a role in Angular 2. Although RxJS has subsumed some of the usefulness of Promises, they are still first-class citizens in ES6 and still play a crucial role.

Chapter 5, ReactiveX Observables, gives you a crash course in how Angular 2 has embraced reactive programming. It includes recipes that demonstrate the basics of Observables and Subjects, as well as advanced implementations that take RxJS to its limits.

Chapter 6, The Component Router, takes you through the totally reworked routing module in Angular 2. It covers both routing basics as well as an array of advanced routing concepts unique to Angular 2.

Chapter 7, Services, Dependency Injection, and NgModule, describes the new and improved dependency injection and module strategies of Angular 2. It gives you all the pieces you need to break your application into independent services and modules, as well as ideal strategies for connecting those pieces together.

Chapter 8, Application Organization and Management, is a broad overview of how you can manage your Angular 2 application inside and outside the client. Angular 2 introduces a number of layers of complexity that require advanced tooling, and this chapter will guide you through how to approach them.

Chapter 9, Angular 2 Testing, will guide you through both how to set up test suites for Angular 2 as well as how to write various types of tests for these suites. Many developers avoid testing when learning a framework anew, and this chapter gently guides you through Angular 2's excellent test infrastructure.

Chapter 10, Performance and Advanced Concepts, is a crash course on the dizzying array of complex concepts that Angular 2 comes with out of the box. This chapter covers program organization and architecture, framework features and tooling, as well as compile-time optimizations.

Every recipe in this book is accompanied by a link to the book's companion site, http://ngcookbook.herokuapp.com/. Recipes that involve code examples will include a link to a live example on Plunker. This will allow you to inspect and test code in real time without having to worry about compilation, local servers, or anything of that ilk. It must be noted, however, that this setup is only appropriate for experimentation and should not be used for user-facing or production applications.

Angular 2 comes in both JavaScript and TypeScript flavors, but this book aims directly at the TypeScript edition, since it is syntactically superior (as you will soon realize). For proper production applications, TypeScript will be compiled into JavaScript before it is served to the browser. The way this book accomplishes this (and many other code preparation tasks) is inside a Node.js install on your local machine. Node.js includes the Node Package Manager (npm), which lets you install and run open source JavaScript software from the command line.

Some chapters in this book will require that you have Node.js installed before running commands and launching a local server or test suite. Furthermore, it is recommended (but not required) that you install the Node Version Manager on top of Node.js, which will make managing your installed packages much easier.

The universe of Angular 2 learning materials is currently fragmented and gross. This book is for both beginner developers looking to sink their teeth into a new framework, as well as advanced developers interested in rounding out their knowledge of a framework that embraces the coming world of web tech.

For newer developers, ingesting all these new technologies at once may seem overwhelming. The organization and pace of this book is designed so that topics are gradually introduced, and design decisions and rationales are explained. Don't worry, this book is still 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: "Karma reads its configuration out of a karma.conf.js file."

A block of code is set as follows:

<p>{{date}}</p> 
<h1>{{title}}</h1> 
<h3>Written by: {{author}}</h3>

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

@Component({ 
  selector: 'article', 
  template: ` 
    <p>{{currentDate|date}}</p> 
    <h1>{{title}}</h1> 
    <h3>Written by: {{author}}</h3> 
  ` 
})

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

npm install karma jasmine-core karma-jasmine --save-dev
npm install karma-cli -g

New terms and important words are shown in bold.

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