In Chapter 3, Prepare Angular App for Production Release, we mentioned the need to deliver a high-quality application. Currently, the app has a terrible look and feel to it, which is only fit for a website created in the late 1990s. The first impression a user or a client will get about your product or your work is very important, so we must be able to create a great looking application that also delivers a great user experience across mobile and desktop browsers.

As full-stack developers, it is difficult to focus on the polish of your application. This gets worse, as the feature set of an application rapidly grows. It is no fun to write great and modular code backing your views, but then revert to CSS hacks and inline styles in a rush to improve your application.

Angular Material is an amazing library that is developed in close coordination with Angular. If you learn how to leverage Angular Material effectively, the features you create will look and work great from the get go, whether you're working on small or large applications. Angular Material will make you a far more effective web developer, because it ships with a wide variety of user controls that you can leverage, and you won't have to worry about browser compatibility. As an added bonus, writing custom CSS will become a rarity.

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

• How to configure Angular Material
• Upgrade the UX with Angular Material