While the first demos and tutorials of AngularJS make very good impression, using it on your own in real life applications quickly leads to confusion and frustration. You soon discover that the documentation falls short of explaining what really is going on, especially in the more advanced areas. It does not do a very good job at showing idiomatic usage either – with proper separation of responsibilities, use of services and directives, etc.

“Mastering Web Application Development with AngularJS” by Paweł Kozłowski and Peter Darwin is really good resource to fill those gaps. It starts with a decent explanation of what AngularJS is all about. How DOM is some kind of a skeleton behind the application, or in other words how application state is directly reflected in DOM. Right after this introduction it introduces unit testing, and from this point on everything is demonstrated not only with the “production” code, but also with accompanying test suites.

Then it starts to dig a bit deeper – from filters, communcation with back-end and navigation through writing custom directives and performance. While the beginning seems to be a bit slow, the chapters on directives are really detailed, have plenty of great examples and do an outstanding job at explaining this difficult subject. Actually, I would say that the whole book may be a bit too advanced for beginners, but then even if you have some experience with Angular, it is well worth reading for the directives alone.

The entire book is organized as a systematic “reference”, with each chapter dedicated to one aspect of the framework: Binding and filters, communication with server, forms, navigation and routing, directives, internationalization, build/deployment, and so on. There also is a complete non-trivial application available on Github, and referenced throughout the book. Each and every aspect has a very accessible and complete explanation. Theory and rationale, working code as well as test suites.

In other words, the book is not a simplistic tutorial, but a detailed study that takes a reasonably complex application and dissects it one “dimension” at a time. You don’t need to study the entire application while reading the book, but it’s a great complementary material that demonstrates how the pieces fit together and is a ready-to-use cookbook of some sort.

If there is anything missing, I would say it’s information on idiomatic usage: How you are supposed to structure your application, divide it into modules and services, and so on. Not that it’s completely missing from the book, but a bit of a bird’s-eye view would be nice as well.

All in all, it’s definitely worth reading. Detailed, non-trivial, doing a great job at explaining the “why’ and demonstrating the “how”.

(I got the book directly from Packt and read it on Kindle – nothing to complain about in this edition, everything readable and comprehensible.)