I'm on my second quest to understand, <i>really</i> understand, how AngularJS fits together. Forensically decomposing the documentation. It's quite slow going, actually; I find myself relying on the code to explain the documentation about as much as the documentation describes the code.<p>My current suspicion is that directives do not get the central billing that they deserve. If you come from other backgrounds, the first thing you wonder about is the whole MVC thing.<p>But then you look at compile phase, link phase and runtime loop. They are dominated by directives and the code that directives set up.<p>It seems to me that a big design step in AngularJS is to <i>extend HTML into the DSL you wish existed</i>. This is done with directives.<p>I'm still going through this process so it might well turn out that when I get to other parts of the manual my perspective will change entirely.
If anyone wants to learn AngularJS, I highly recommend Thinkster.io, which launched just recently: <a href="http://www.thinkster.io/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thinkster.io/</a><p>I've used it and found their way of breaking it into steps really helpful.
Hey - you might want to add www.thinkster.io to the "extended reading" section, as its regarded as one of the best free comprehensive angularjs resources (and uses many of the egghead videos)
A nice read.<p>One thing I'm always wondering is how people organize their code in an AngularJS project. The seed project and others have all directives in one file, all services is one etc. This quickly gets messy. Using different files for each, I have to include <i>a lot</i> of js files in the main page. Not sure what to do.
Directives are the game changer. Dreams of dynamic markup come true. There are still a few limitations especially wrt routing/view/state, but that is being actively worked on. It's hard to see a future of the web where angularjs doesn't play a starring role. Get your head around dependency injection and eureeka!
One thing that really impressed me is how Angular does dependency injection, seemingly through magic.<p>This blog explains more: <a href="http://www.alexrothenberg.com/2013/02/11/the-magic-behind-angularjs-dependency-injection.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.alexrothenberg.com/2013/02/11/the-magic-behind-an...</a>