Back to the Web – but where to start?

In my previous post I described my desire to revive my web programming skills and tune up to the latest frameworks.  The question is: which frameworks, and in

Illustration depicting signs with a confusion concept.what order?

This is a question that I struggled over for quite a while; checking in with friends with expertise in various aspects of web programming.

I’ve concluded a few things so far:

  • You can’t learn everything at once
  • You don’t need to learn everything at once
  • It is important to leverage what you already know

Given that, I intend, initially to focus on building enough of a back-end to serve my needs both for web applications and for my mobile work.

My second (fun) project will be Angular 2.  I spent a few weeks learning TypeScript and I’ll be using that for my Angular 2 programming.  (If you don’t know TypeScript and you want to do anything with Angular 2, stop reading this and go learn TypeScript now.)

For the back-end I intend to look at how ASP.NET Core wants you to build RESTful services.  For Angular 2, I will go through the Tour of Heroes (again) and then on through the documentation and the Pluralsight courses I mentioned in my previous post.

What I won’t tackle is all the rest of ASP.NET Core, nor Gulp, Grunt, nor any of the related technologies, except to the extent I absolutely need them, and then only as much as I need.

Tooling

The other required bit of work is to choose and learn the editor/IDE.  I’ll do my back end work in Visual Studio 2015 because I know it and it is a great environment for ASP.NET Core.

However, my tool of choice for Angular 2 is VS Code.  This editor, like Angular 2 is cross platform, and it is very clean, very fast, and nicely familiar.  I recommend John Papa’s course on VS Code if you want to come up to speed quickly.

Getting Started

If you are going to create applications in Angular 2 for the Tour of Heroes, or even just for your own tooling around, I highly recommend using the git repository to set up your dev environment.  This is all explained, in detail, here.

Briefly, the steps are:

  • Create a directory (let’s say my-proj)
  • Open a terminal or command window and enter
    git clone  https://github.com/angular/quickstart  my-proj
  • change directory to that project, get rid of the existing .git files, and if you want to create a local repository.
  • You are ready to go.

I shall report back as I dive deeper.

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. His latest book, Building APIs with .NET will be released early in 2025. Liberty is a Senior SW Engineer for CNH and he was a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Microsoft MVP.
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