Welcome to the chapter on Angular Material. I must say, I'm impressed. Statistics show that most of the people who buy tech books don't get very far into them. You are a little more than halfway through the book—a job well done, Angular Jedi!

This will be a short chapter for a couple of reasons. First, this book is heavily intended to be used for building applications, primarily using Angular and Bootstrap. So think of this chapter as an added bonus for us. The other reason is this chapter is only intended to be an introduction to an alternative user interface (UI) component library, to Bootstrap when working with Angular. There should be a separate book on Angular Material alone, but this chapter will cover a lot of ground in terms of showing you the capabilities and components that the library offers. 

We will learn about navigation and menu components, layout components, form field elements, buttons, dialog and pop-up components, and lots of fun elements that you will definitely appreciate, and possibly consider for the framework in your next project.

By summarizing, the topics we will be covering in this chapter are:

• What is Angular Material?
• Installing Angular Material
• Categories of components

Okay, let's get right to it by starting with the description of what Angular Material is.