Angular Material is a rich collection of components, which can be easily plugged into Angular applications, and also works on web, mobile, and desktop applications. Material Design comes from Google, the makers of Angular, which essentially means that there is a lot of native support, optimization, and performance tuning done for the components, as well as for the new ones that will be rolled out in future. The following list shows some of the benefits we get when we consider using Material Design in our applications:

• The UI components are ready to be used right away, without any extra development efforts
• We can selectively choose to use the components individually, rather than being forced to import all the modules in one go
• The rendering of the components is extremely fast
• It is easy to plug data into components via a two-way or one-way data binding functionality, which is an extremely powerful feature of Angular
• The components have the same look, feel, and behavior across web, mobile, and desktop applications, which solves a lot of cross-browser and cross-device issues
• The performance is tuned and optimized for integration with Angular applications

Before we proceed any further in this chapter, let's quickly generate the application where we will implement all of the Angular Material components. Run the following ng command in order to generate a new application named AngularMaterial:

ng new AngularMaterial

Once the command has been successfully executed, we should see the output shown in the following screenshot:

Now that our application has been generated, let's learn how to install the Angular Material library in our project.