Sometimes it is difficult to wade through the many languages, platforms, frameworks, applications, tools, and other elements presented in the ever-changing world of information technology application development and operations. Applicants who aspire to a successful career in fields such as programming and DevOps find themselves faced with a choice – what languages should they learn? What applications and tools should they be familiar with?

What is Angular?
Let’s start with the basics of what Angular is. To effectively answer this question, what better place to start than with a quote from the actual creators of the platform ? According to the platform’s website, “Angular is a platform that makes it easy to build applications online. Angular combines declarative templates, dependency implementation, end-to-end tools, and integrated best practices to solve development problems. Angular gives developers the ability to build applications that run on the web, on mobile devices, or on computers.”

In general, Angular is an open-source web application interface framework that is largely supported by Google, as well as an extended community of people and companies. It is fully extensible and also works well with other libraries.

What is AngularJS? How is it different from Angular?
No conversation about Angular would be complete without mentioning AngularJS. You may have heard it used in reference to different versions of Angular. The term “AngularJS” is used for any version of 1.x Angular. Just so you know how far back it was, Angular version 7 was released in mid-October 2018 and version 8 should be out by April of this year.

The biggest difference between AngularJS and the other versions is that the former uses JavaScript and the latter uses TypeScript (hence the “JS” in the former’s name!). AngularJS also requires complex training and is more complex than its followers. Although it still exists, it has been overtaken by other frameworks as well as later versions of Angular.

In fact, over the past few years, AngulaJS has given way to ReactJS as the framework preferred by JavaScript developers. That’s why if you want to learn Angular, it’s recommended that you take the most recent iteration. If you’re already familiar with AngularJS, it’s time to upgrade your skills and take your knowledge to the next level. It’s better to move on!

Who uses Angular?
So who uses Angular anyway? What percentage of programmers use Angular? And who comes up with all these questions?

Well, for starters, as of 2017, companies that have used Angular to build their websites include Google, PayPal, Nike, HBO, General Motors, Sony, The Guardian and Upwork. And that’s a good lineup!

In addition, Angular is very popular with developers, especially on high-traffic sites.

The benefits of learning Angular
There are many platforms and tools out there, so what makes Angular so special? What are the benefits that make it so important for developers to know the pros and cons of it? Here are some of the most impressive benefits of Angular:

Less coding.
The best code is short but efficient, allowing for maximum functionality with minimal effort. Fortunately, Angular supports the Model Representation Control (MVC) architecture. All a developer needs to do is split up their code to match the MVC architecture, and Angular will take care of the rest! No need to worry about the MVC pipeline.

Ease of integration.
There are many frameworks that already have Angular integrated into them, including Kendo UI, Wijmo, and Ionic, just to name a few. This shows that Angular works well with others.
Supported single-page applications.
A single-page application is defined as a web application that loads a single HTML page. The page is then dynamically updated according to user interaction with the web application. Single-page applications, or SPAs for short, can interact with back-end servers without having to update the entire web page in order to load data into the application. No one likes to wait too long to reload a full web page, so SPAs can improve user interaction by reducing load times.
Angular uses a declarative user interface
Angular uses HTML, and that’s an important point. When it comes to defining the user interface of an application, HTML is the best choice. HTML is an intuitive and declarative language that is not as complex as JavaScript.