Let’s say you want to learn AngularJS, what do you do? You go to Google and you type “Getting started with angularjs”. Like most Google searches the top one or two results is usually exactly what you are looking for. In the case of “getting started with angularjs” the top result is https://docs.angularjs.org/misc/started. Look at that, docs.angularjs.org, that looks very official so you decide to check it out. The upper left hand corner has the current version and build number, so this site must contain documentation for the current build. That’s good, I don’t want to have to fool around with old versions.

The site doesn’t have a lot of information, but it does have a few links. The first link that a newbie is likely to want to view is the “Angular JS Tutorial”. That takes you to this monstrosity of a tutorial, which you would only tackle if you hate yourself and you have a week with nothing to do. So you hit the back button back the home page thinking “If only they had something easier that I could start with, you know, like a Build a Blog (1st result) or Build a Todo list (1st result)”.

Then you see it: a link to “Introduction to AngularJS”, which takes you to a video. It’s not a bad video however there are two problems with it:

1. The guy rockets through the video, presumably to keep it under 15 minutes
2. The code in the video does not work with the current version of AngularJS. Yep, the first result of a Google search for a Google Javascript Framework contains links to a huge Tutorial that would take a week to get through and a non-working introductory tutorial video. Nice work guys, way to stay on top of things.

AngularJS is becoming quite popular and it has its good parts and its bad parts and this isn’t the first post to complain about the documentation. Almost every criticism of Angular will list shitty documentation as one of the top one or two issues.

However, this post is going to go one step further. Your old pal Mike has created code that matches the intro video word for word, only it is up to date with the latest stable build of AngularJS. You can find the code here: https://github.com/hoitomt/angular-intro-1.3.11. Watch the video but use the code from this Github repo. Of course this repo will age, it might even be obsolete by the time you read this. I’ll see what I can do about keeping it up to date.