What you need for this book

Every recipe in this book is accompanied by a link to the book's companion site, . Recipes that involve code examples will include a link to a live example on Plunker. This will allow you to inspect and test code in real time without having to worry about compilation, local servers, or anything of that ilk. It must be noted, however, that this setup is only appropriate for experimentation and should not be used for user-facing or production applications.

Angular 2 comes in both JavaScript and TypeScript flavors, but this book aims directly at the TypeScript edition, since it is syntactically superior (as you will soon realize). For proper production applications, TypeScript will be compiled into JavaScript before it is served to the browser. The way this book accomplishes this (and many other code preparation tasks) is inside a Node.js install on your local machine. Node.js includes the Node Package Manager (npm), which lets you install and run open source JavaScript software from the command line.

Some chapters in this book will require that you have Node.js installed before running commands and launching a local server or test suite. Furthermore, it is recommended (but not required) that you install the Node Version Manager on top of Node.js, which will make managing your installed packages much easier.