Beginning AngularJS Pre-class Notes
It is my sincerest desire to make the Beginning AngularJS class an epic hands-on training experience. In order to squeeze everything into an eight hour class we will need to hit the ground running. Please feel free to contact me via the Meetup page for public questions or by email if you would like to ask something confidentially (rockncoder@gmail.com).
In order to do web development on your personal machine you will need a web server. Many browsers, including Chrome, will not allow websites launched from a file to access other files. This is a security precaution to stop hackers from steal your files. If you are using WebStorm, it includes a web server. If you are using some other IDE, see if it includes a web server. As an option you can or take a look at Mongoose. Its free edition runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. I will not cover installing it in class, but in an upcoming blog post I will list the installation for Mac OS X and Windows.
We will also be using Node.js, not as a web backend, but as a cross-platform command line tool. Many frameworks and tools like Grunt, PhoneGap, and AngularJS, write their command line utilities in JavaScript and deploy them as Node Package Modules (NPM). Node.js is available for free, for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
We will be using Firebase as both a database and as a hosting service. Things will go much faster the day of the class if you sign up for an account beforehand. There is no charge for a developer account. The one caveat is that you can't choose the URL for your website. It will be chosen for you. Your site will be publicly visible, so you will be able to share it with anyone you send the URL.
The night before the class I will make the source code for the app available on my GitHub account. You won't need to sign up to download the code but you may want to get familiar with GitHub before hand. I have lots of code samples in JavaScript on GitHub if you are curious.
If you would like to follow along step by step, you will want to have Git on your machine. Having Git installed will make it easy to follow along with the sample app development and guarantee that you are starting from the same point as the instructor at the beginning of each lesson. Git is available for free, for pretty much every computer system known to mankind.
