This is my personal review for the best Angular course with 263K+ students on Udemy, Angular 8 (formerly Angular 2) – The Complete Guide, by Maximilian Schwarzmüller.
Length: 36.5 hours
Total students: 264.000+
Includes: 42 articles, 170 downloadable resources, assignments
Category: Development > Web Development > Angular
Angular is one of the most modern, performance-efficient and powerful frontend frameworks you can learn as of today. The powerful features and capabilities of Angular allow you to create complex, customizable, modern, responsive and user-friendly web applications.
Angular 8 (formerly Angular 2) – The Complete Guide is ranked as the sixth most popular course on Udemy. It teaches you all the fundamentals about modules, directives, components, data binding, routing, and HTTP access.
Meet the Instructor
Let’s meet the producer behind Angular 8 (formerly Angular 2) – The Complete Guide before digging into the details of the review.
Maximilian Schwarzmüller
Maximilian Schwarzmüller is a self-taught developer and instructor, who had the chance to broaden his horizon studying Business Administration where he holds a Master’s degree. For him, the most rewarding experience is to see how people find new, better jobs, build awesome web applications, acquire amazing projects, or simply enjoy their hobby with the help of his content.
Other Udemy courses by Maximilian Schwarzmüller and his team include:
- React: The Complete Guide (incl Hooks, React Router, Redux)
- Vue JS 2 – The Complete Guide (incl. Vue Router &
Vuex ) - Angular & NodeJS – The MEAN Stack Guide
At First Glance
As Angular 8 (formerly Angular 2) – The Complete Guide starts completely from scratch, you neither need to know Angular 1 nor Angular 2 to begin. Plus, Angular 8 simply is the latest version of the Angular framework and simply an update to Angular 2.
This Udemy course uses TypeScript to ensure you have the best possible preparation for creating Angular apps. TypeScript is the main language used by the official Angular team and the language you’ll mostly see in Angular tutorials. It’s a superset to JavaScript and makes writing Angular apps easier.
If you ever get stuck, you’ll benefit from extremely fast and friendly support both via direct messaging or discussion.
What You’ll Learn
During Angular 8 (formerly Angular 2) – The Complete Guide, you will learn how to:
- develop modern, complex, responsive and scalable web applications with Angular 8
- fully understand the architecture behind an Angular 8 application and how to use it
- use their gained, deep understanding of the Angular 8 fundamentals to quickly establish themselves as frontend developers
- create single-page applications with one of the most modern JavaScript frameworks out there
The course also shows you how to use the Angular CLI and features a complete project, which allows you to practice the things learned throughout the course.
Course Content
Angular 8 (formerly Angular 2) – The Complete Guide is a medium-size course at 36.5 hours in length. The class is structured accordingly with 497 lectures.
- Debugging
- Components & Databinding Deep Dive
- Directives Deep Dive
- Using Services & Dependency Injection
- Changing Pages with Routing
- Understanding Observables
- Handling Forms in Angular Apps
- Using Pipes to Transform Output
- Making Http Requests
- Authentication & Route Protection in Angular Apps
- Using Angular Modules & Optimizing Apps
- Deploying an Angular App
- Angular Animations
- Adding Offline Capabilities with Service Workers
- A Basic Introduction to Unit Testing in Angular Apps
Basic Requirements
- No Angular 1 or Angular 2 knowledge is required
- Basic HTML and CSS knowledge helps, but isn’t a must-have
- Prior TypeScript knowledge also helps but isn’t necessary to benefit from this course
- Basic JavaScript knowledge is required
What I Like
1. Quick Responses
If you look through the reviews on Udemy, you will see that Maximilian actually took time to answer almost all of them. He would say thanks on high-rated reviews and promptly suggest what to do for people leaving low-rated reviews.
The same goes for the Q&A section. Every time I had a question, Max or his teaching assistant would respond after just a few hours or even minutes. Not only are their responses accurate but they also provide me with extra examples and multiple links to resources.
2. Up-to-Date Content
I read somewhere that Max actually sat down to re-record the courses multiple times to keep them up-to-date. I didn’t believe it at first. But having experienced with two of his popular courses on Udemy, this one and React: The Complete Guide (incl Hooks, React Router, Redux), I now know that he does update them quite frequently.
When I started this course, it was Angular 2 then Angular 4. And just a month later, here we are on Angular 7 and there have been some issues with libraries being incompatible. Max has been very prompt at updating videos, putting notes or other notifications to help students keep up to date. One can say that he has committed to reliving all of his courses.
3. Working Codes
I was surprised at how most of the code examples in this course managed to work flawlessly. The only issues I had appeared near the end of the course with the Unit Testing, Service Workers, and Workflow (which I could not get to compile with Angular 8). I am hoping in the future Max will update those two sections so I can re-visit them.
What I Think Can Be Improved
Maximilian Schwarzmüller is not a native speaker of English. He has quite a strong accent that I sometimes imagined he was speaking German instead. What’s worse is that he speaks pretty fast. Although we can always turn on the subtitles, I feel a bit distracted by his intonation.
As mentioned above, one of the advantages of the course is that it gets updated frequently. However, when you see the course as a whole, it’s fragmented. There was this piece of old content, there was that bit of new material. I guess this is why most of the one-star reviews say that the course looks “all over the place.”
Who Should Take This Course?
In short, Angular 8 (formerly Angular 2) – The Complete Guide is an ideal course for beginners who just start with Angular.
I took this course after starting an application and struggling with the frontend Angular code. As I progressed through the course, it has answered my questions and given me a much better understanding of what is happening and how I need to do things in Angular.
I also give Max full respect for teaching such a comprehensive course on a technology that changes constantly. Indeed, I could see how much of a challenge it is to teach an Angular course when Google and other vendors keep making frequent updates that break the code or change certain libraries.
Hope that you’ve found my review about the course Angular 8 (formerly Angular 2) – The Complete Guide on Udemy helpful.
Happy learning!