Angular JS Directives <small>by Alex Vanston</small>.

I’ve recently been playing a lot of Fez, a 2-D (kinda) platforming/puzzle video game. Many of the puzzles use a series of symbols in squares as a code language. I really liked the way the language looked, and so I decided to write a small single page app in Angular to transliterate English into the Fezish alphabet. The first implementation was written as a filter, and it seemed to work okay, but emitting a bunch of HTML and then forcing the user of the filter to use a sanitizer to get it to render as HTML was kinda strange. That very same day, in an odd twist of fate, I got some email from Packt Publishing asking if I would be interested in featuring their new Angular JS book on my blog. Long story short, I agreed to post a review of it here in exchange for a free copy of the eBook. So on to the review…

The first thing that struck me about Angular JS Directives was the writing. I’ve read a lot of extremely dry technical books which were hard to get through, and I’m happy to say that this is not one of them. I found the writing both engaging and amusing. There are a few times where the author even pokes fun at himself for repeating the same points, which was wonderful to see. The examples were clear to read, and ably demonstrated the points that the accompanying text was making. The overall flow of the book mostly made sense, with simpler concepts leading to more complicated concepts. My only suggestion is that the chapter on Testing could have been introduced sooner, and then used in the rest of the examples to prove things were working the way that the author claimed.

I don’t like to only say positive things about something I’m reviewing, both because I believe that there’s always something that could be done better, and because I don’t want to look like a corporate shill. At least not for $17. ;) So, on to the bad things I’ve run into. It took me a lot longer to read than I would have hoped. This was partially because of a bunch of work stuff taking up all my spare time, but also because after every few pages I wanted to go back and re-write large parts of the projects I’ve done. :) My other concern is that $17 for 87 pages of content might not not be worth it to you. I found the content very useful, and I’ve certainly gotten $17 worth of knowledge out of it, but at my previous job, where I didn’t use any JavaScript much less Angular, it wouldn’t have been money well spent.

Having said all that, after the fourth chapter, I re-wrote the Fezish Filter as a Directive, and the code became far cleaner. And now that I’m done reading the ninth chapter, I think I might spend the rest of this weekend adding some unit and end-to-end tests. So in the end, would I recommend this book? Yes. Yes I would.

(Monday October 14th edit: I’ve also just been informed that Packt is running a Columbus Day sale, and if you use the discount code "COL50" in the next four days, you’ll get 50% off this, and any other eBook or video, so if you’re thinking of buying it, today would be a great day to do so!)