In this episode of Adventures in Angular the panel interviews Zama Khan Mohammed about his recent book and other open source work he has done in the Angular community. Zama explains what is so different about his book and why it is worth reading. His book takes an approach different than the common practice of walking readers through concepts, instead, his book walks readers through using a project perspective. 

 

The first chapter walks through setting up Angular, installing Angular CLI and Angular console. After the set up is complete he walks readers through a very basic flashbase application. Zama explains how this first chapter is geared toward beginners. In his book, Zama shows users how to use the whole platform. He covers PWA and how to create brand new projects from scratch.  

 

The panel asks him about his unique project perspective strategy for this book. Each chapter of Zama’s book walks the readers through a different project, unlike most technical books that walk readers through one project introducing a different concept each chapter. Zama explains why he wrote the book this way. He wanted to bring different libraries and tools into each project to highlight how deep and rich the Angular community and ecosystem are. The panel shares how the ecosystem and community make Angular so great to use. 

 

Zama’s book is called Angular Projects and was published by Packt Publishing. Zama shares where to find it for those interested. The panel considers how hard writing a book must be. Zama explains the time and stress involved in writing a book. He admits he has been approached to write more books but has resolved to wait a bit before diving back into writing. 

The panel discusses Zama’s open source efforts in the Angular community. They consider a few of his projects including, ngx-formly, codelyzer, and ngx-loading. He wrote ngx-formly after using formerly and he decided he wanted to use it with Angular 2.0. The panel was impressed with his contributions to codelyzer, where he helped with the accessibility requirements. 

 

After using react-loadable Zama knew he wanted a similar feature in Angular to provide more control over loading so he built ngx-loadable. The panel defines lazy loading for listeners and explains how having control over what can load and how fast it can load can be useful in applications. Zama shares some of the improvements he has made in version 2.0. 

 

Zama shares his hopes for speaking at ng-conf 2020, this takes the panel down a tangent discussing the exciting workshops that will be at ng-conf next year. Brian Love will be teaching a two-day workshop on Angular fundamentals. Aaron Frost is teaching and observables class and a reactive angular class. They advise everyone to buy an ng-conf ticket and not to be afraid to submit a CFP. 

 

Back on topic, Zama shares the challenges in writing, publishing and maintaining an opensource library. He explains how contributing to open source is a great way to learn and a great way to see what a framework can do. He shares advice for those looking to get into open source and invites everyone to try Hacktoberfest.

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