Earlier this year I started working with a team of .NET developers writing a Single Page Application using a whole bunch of JavaScript libraries and frameworks. Transitioning from the world of .NET, Silverlight and CSLA to the new 'wild west' of JavaScript, whilst trying to remain productive and deliver working functionality has been a huge challenge.
I made an early decision to use Pluralsight training as the basis for getting everybody up to speed as quickly as possible.
John Papa's Single Page Architecture in-depth and fast-paced courses on Pluralsight were a huge jump-start, but even with a concentrated six to seven hours running time proved so intense that developers who'd 'completed' (ie viewed) the courses three times in total were still struggling to remember crucial guidlines and coding methods, and when they really needed to re-reference it struggled to find where in the video a specific, quickly talked through code sample had been.
I ended up spending far too many weekends transcribing the video contents of key chapters from different Pluralsight courses into readable PDFs to try and get our team up-to-speed a lot quicker. Since Pluralsight is a paid-for subscription service, unfortunately this material can only be used by my fellow team members who all have paid up Pluralsight subscriptions.
However, there's a host of similar video training material (mostly user group talks) that's available for free. Our biggest learning curve (which is ongoing) was around the awesome AngularJS framework. After flirting with Durandal and Knockout to get up and running with our SPA application, we switched to Angular (with Breeze) as the main framework on which to base our Single Page Application. Its ability to dispense with many individual libraries, dramatically reduce the size of our code base, strong community support with increasing momentum, and its sheer elegance were factors in deciding to use Angular.
Thanks to the generosity of the original video speakers, I've been able to make publicly available these "Angular PDF transcripts" for those who, like me, find re-watching video a poor way of revisiting excellent reference material.
I should stress that my recommendation would be that you watch the videos (links in the individual PDFs) first, and simply use these PDF downloads as backup - a quicker way to revisit the video contents when you want to, and get to the relevant material. (Video 'jump to' timings are shown directly underneath each slide in the PDFs if you really want to go back and view the original video material on a given topic).
The transcripts I've received permission to make available are as follows:
- AngularJS Best Practices by Misko Hevery
- AngularJS Animations by Matias Niemela
- Angular Version 1.2 And Beyond by Brad Green and Igor Minor
- CRUD Apps with Angular and Breeze by Ward Bell
My thanks to Misko Hevery, Matias Niemela and John Lantz (on behalf of Ward Bell) for giving permission for these transcripts to be made publicly available. The material available here is the results of their hard work and not mine, and they own the intellectual copyright. I hope you find them useful.
