Today I finished Pro AngularJS by Adam Freeman. It’s 650 pages long (if you exclude the index etc.) and I read most of it thoroughly. That includes doing the coding exercises. The only bits I skimmed were the more esoteric features that I’d never remember and almost certainly never use. In total, I’d estimate that I carefully studied about 80% of the book.

How long it took

I started the book on 6 July, and it took me 63 study hours to complete over 69 study days. That’s just over 10 pages an hour. Along the way I recreated most of my portfolio site in AngularJS as well as exploring the concepts across different sources (but none of that time is included in the 63 hours), so it is possible that I could have condensed the number of days a bit.

What I got out of it

At this time I’d say I’ve got a good grasp of AngularJS fundamentals and would feel pretty comfortable creating a single-page application using it. I’ll need to do more to and get some real hands-on experience to before I’d add it as a skill to my CV, though.

Was this time well spent?

The Pro AngularJS book is good and seems to provide a pretty comprehensive overview of the framework. That said, it seemed to me to be three separate books combined into one:

  1. Around 40% of the book is a well-structured, written and considered introduction to AngularJS features and best practices.
  2. A further 30% introduces the more advanced features of the framework. I think he does a great job providing context for these, but I can’t really see any but the most advanced users feeling comfortable in their use to initially, at least.
  3. The remainder to which is actually presented first to is an example AngularJS project.

For my purposes, it would have been better if these had been delivered as two separate titles, with an accompanying coding project. That said, this would be hard to achieve because so many of the concepts are interrelated.

What I’ll do differently next time

I won’t be approaching any new subject via a book which has ‘Pro’ in the title. This is definitely a good book, but it would perhaps have been better as my second book on the subject.

I think I’m also going to divert more of my efforts to video courses, since they’re likely to provide a better return on investment. For that reason I’ve cancelled my Safari account and signed up with Pluralsight.

Next steps

Over the next day or so I’ll decide what I’ll tackle next. At the moment I’m quite keen on the AngularJS Fundamentals course from Pluralsight. I’m also considering taking a break from JavaScript and maybe looking at something else to maybe Git, maybe even SVG. Who knows.