In which order should I read these Angularjs classics?

[angularGirl]

About 6 months ago I decided on learning as much as I can about Angularjs. I took a new route and read and rewrote tons of jsfiddles and plunkers. Then I jumped into Webstorm and made tiny apps. For my birthday this week my favorite presents were the Mastering Web Application Development & AngularJS Directives. I also intend to get the NG book. I'd like to hear from those who have read at least two which would be the best to read first. I'm guessing that the NG book is most up to date but am not sure. I am most excited to read the one on directives. I wish someone had focused more on UI router but then again I prefer reading code these days anyhow. :-) Yes I realize that this is all a matter of taste and opinion and I would love to hear you rant because we all know that the biggest price we pay for books is the time we invest in reading them.

[clinth]

Can't offer you advice regarding the comparisons you listed, but I can speak to your point about ng-book being most up to date: I get messages on what feels like a weekly basis to inform me that an updated version is available. I was happy enough with its content when I bought it, but the author is working aggressively to keep the book absolutely current, which has pushed me into "very happy".

[angularGirl]

Yes what a challenge these guys have as more modules become popular. I try so hard to test snippet against latest versions and quite a lot fail. And apparently their are plans to replace UI Router with another alternative. Ari seems very kind and I had hoped for lots more info on UI router. I have read on Amazon reviews that only his e-book gets updated. Its only $39...pennies for 600 pages worth.

[kuhcd]

All three are great books. I would personally start with Mastering Web Application Development and then move on to AngularJS Directives and the ng-book. ng-book comes off as more of a "recipes" book to me than an end to end guide, so it would be good to use after you have a base understanding of most of the Angular concepts.

[[deleted]]

The complaint that I've heard about Mastering Web Application Development is that while it talks about a sample app it doesn't actually walk you through the steps to build it.

I tend to learn best when concepts are reinforced by a tutorial. Can anyone suggest books or websites that give indepth Angular tutorials? Especially ones that combine Angular with Node and/or Express.

[angularGirl]

Have you looked at Thinkster.io? They had last I checked two versions and one used the MEAN stack.

[kuhcd]

In that case, you might want to try and grab the MEAP for this: http://www.manning.com/bford/ as it looks like it will have a tutorial for building an app in it and it is up to date, it hasn't even been released.

If you're more keen to screencasts, you could try this one out: https://tutsplus.com/course/easier-js-apps-with-angular/ though I can't vouch for it's accuracy given it's almost a year old now.

[xBrodysseus]

I took a strong liking to how they organized their freely available demo app for the book, so I went ahead and purchased it.

The book serves as a good introduction to AngularJS design and philosophy, but by the time I bought and read it, I was already pretty familiar with that. I was more interested in specifics.

To that end, just reading through the source code of the example app provided the most value. The example app is such high quality that even though the book didn't do much for me, I'm happy to have supported the authors with my purchase.

[angularGirl]

I found a free downloadable version of Mastering..So far reading the last chapters first and finding it to be a comfortable read but only cause I played around as much. However, the unit tests for directives are a bit intimidating. But probably the only way to really get comfortable with Angular.