Conventions Used In This Book

• Code samples in this book are written in ES6, so you should have a solid grasp of ES6 features before continuing.

  See: How to Learn ES6 by Eric Elliott & Babel's Learn ES2015 article.

• Formation relies heavily on Angular components, introduced in version 1.5. You should familiarize yourself with this API before reading this guide.

  See: AngularJS's Understanding Components article.

• The variable vm is commonly used throughout code samples and refers to a generic parent controller's controllerAs alias.

  See: AngularJS's Controller As and the vm Variable by John Papa

• import app from 'app';is commonly used throughout code samples and refers to an Angular module reference. When using a module-bundler like Webpack, it is more terse and less error-prone to refer to an application's Angular module directly, by reference, rather than using angular.module to look it up.

  Prior to module-bundlers, this how Angular modules were referenced:

  // app.js
  angular.module('MyApp', []);
  

  // fooCtrl.js
  angular.module('MyApp').controller('FooCtrl', function () {
    // ...
  });
  

  These files were then concatenated using some hack to ensure that app.js appeared in the output bundle before fooCtrl.js.

  With the advent of module-bundlers, it is much more practical to simply create a module that exports a reference to the Angular app:

  // app.js
  import angular from 'angular';
  
  export default angular.module('MyApp', []);
  

  // fooCtrl.js
  import app from 'app';
  
  app.controller('FooCtrl', function () {
    // ...
  });
  

• // => is used to denote the result of evaluating of the preceding expression.

  'b' + 'a' + + 'a' + 'a'; // => 'baNaNa';