This chapter was packed with a wide array of topics, I know. It was inevitable because there is no one best starting point for all the readers. For instance, some readers know what wireframes are and have used them for years, while other readers may have only just heard of the term, or maybe not even that. This is the third edition of this book, but it is quite a bit different from the first two editions and even if it was largely the same, which it isn't, it doesn't mean that readers have already gone through the first two editions. You can think of this first chapter as a type of funnel—a wide enough funnel that brings readers of all levels of experience, and differing knowledge, into a common track for learning Angular, and the other symbiotic technologies that are covered in this book. Starting with Chapter 2, ECMAScript and TypeScript Crash Course, the funnel approach is over. The rest of the chapters will be a lot more focused on the subject matter at hand. So, thank you for hanging in there with me. Still, I hope that there were a few things that made wading through this first couple of dozen pages worthwhile, even if you're not completely new to Angular.

In review, we covered the evolution of Angular, including its semantic versioning and release schedule. Although the installation of NodeJS, npm, and the CLI are covered in Appendix A, this chapter is what guided that discussion, and we then used the CLI to build our first Angular app and a to-do list app together. We'll name the app to-do list because we're developers and not marketers (wink). We also covered how to use StackBlitz for building the same Angular application without having any reliance on our local development environment. We then covered the first very basic building blocks of Angular that you need to know well since they will be used again and again for any Angular apps you build. Namely, these were templating, property binding, event binding, and class binding. Lastly, we introduced the annotated photo album application that we'll be building together throughout this book and covered UX design principles, wireframing, and paper prototyping along the way. Whew! Mama mia!

In the next chapter, we will first understand the relationship between JavaScript and TypeScript. We will the as then, as the name suggests, do a crash course on TypeScript and it's advantages over JavaScript.