To explore some practical applications of the stack in web development, we will create an Angular application first and use it as a base application, which we will use for subsequent use cases.

Starting off with the latest version of Angular is pretty straightforward. All you need as a prerequisite is to have Node.js preinstalled in your system. To test whether you have Node.js installed on your machine, go to the Terminal on the Mac or the command prompt on Windows and type the following command:

node -v

That should show you the version of Node.js that is installed. If you have something like the following:

node: command not found

This means that you do not have Node.js installed on your machine.

Once you have Node.js set up on your machine, you get access to npm, also known as the node package manager command-line tool, which can be used to set up global dependencies. Using the npm command, we will install the Angular CLI tool, which provides us with many Angular utility methods, including—but not limited to—creating a new project.