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JavaScript AngularJS An Introduction to Two-Way Data Binding Looking at ng-model: Part 2

Wow, so lost!

Did i miss something. Going from ng-model: Part 1 to Part 2 felt like going from 0 to 100. We were just talking about such basic stuff. I haven't even set up Angular on my computer yet. I thought they might walk you through that, but that fine I can figure it out. Then they flash the website Halo for half a second and jump right into using it with Angular. Not sure what it is. Is there a course on Halo? Is there a course on taking this course? Ofcourse it doesnt help that when I click launch workspace nothing happens. I wonder if these episodes are in the right order. It seems kind of buggy. Not sure if it's just a learning curve or misordered presentation. The quiz seems a little off as well.

Matt Hoenecke
Matt Hoenecke
8,360 Points

I agree. Part 1 was fine but Part 2 throws a lot at you with minimum explanation. The challenge after the quiz is also confusing.

Also David I found that if nothing happens when clicking the workspace button, refreshing the page seems to fix that. I understood it a bit better after re-typing it in the workspace.

James Best
James Best
11,112 Points

Agreed, the step between the 2 lessons is HUGE. I can only image what the rest of the course is going to be like.

I found that this site is also helping - https://thinkster.io/angulartutorial/a-better-way-to-learn-angularjs/

pietro capriata
pietro capriata
18,066 Points

i agree with you.. first lesson ok! second lesson... to many new things...

Jesse Sudich
Jesse Sudich
11,398 Points

I am in the same boat of feeling overwhelmed so early in the course. Throwing in Hallo with it's own built in methods and plug-ins just confuses things further. I'll keep persisting for now but I already feel like I should work through another tutorial to start with Angular.

Hossam Khalifa
Hossam Khalifa
17,200 Points

I started with the code school course its amazing and really comprehensible

Kostas Oreopoulos
Kostas Oreopoulos
15,184 Points

James Best

Thx for the link. Great Tutorial and also I didn't know about egghead!!

Ya I am right there with you all on the huge leap in part 2. I have no clue how to complete the code challenge - just completely lost at this point.

21 Answers

Hossam Khalifa
Hossam Khalifa
17,200 Points

I am also to confused from the whole course. The free supported by google code school course worked better for me : Check it out

Jesse Sudich
Jesse Sudich
11,398 Points

Agreed. Code School course is so far above this, it's ridiculous. Goodbye Treehouse, Hello Code School.

Austin Langdon
Austin Langdon
12,667 Points

The flow of this course is aggressive. I just completed the free CodeSchool AngularJS course and recommend it to anyone that is also struggling with the AngularJS TreeHouse course.

Hossam Khalifa
Hossam Khalifa
17,200 Points

Codeschool is also adding another Angular Course to Theti library ,it will be a lot better I think at least than treehouse and it will also have more advanced topics. Plus did "ng-include " work for you??

Richard Barkinskiy
Richard Barkinskiy
10,663 Points

I'm going through the CodeSchool AngularJS course now and so far it's much better than this Treehouse course. I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn AngularJS.

I concur. It was much easier to follow.

@ Hossam, I had an issue with ng-include as well. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14420337/is-it-possible-to-use-ng-include-without-web-server helped explain it.

Tried the Codeschool course first before this and all I can say that Codeschool did a better job of explaining AngularJS.

Ryan Hellerud
Ryan Hellerud
3,635 Points

same for me, so confusing, no bridge between basic and advanced material

pietro capriata
pietro capriata
18,066 Points

And so will treehouse "debug" the course?

Angular basics are actually pretty easy (I've done the phonecat tutorial, codeschool tutorial and the one on thinkster.io) but you cant learn angular like this, its way too hard.

Why didnt you (treehouse) just start this course with simply attaching angular to the html document and learn the basics of controllers (and the role of scope) and gradually expand from there.

For me this is also the worst course of treehouse so far.

pietro capriata
pietro capriata
18,066 Points

thx for thinkster.io ... I don't know it!

Very good tutorial (thinkster)

Luis Vazquez
Luis Vazquez
6,370 Points

I agree. This course is confusing... Not a very good outline for Angularjs. Hopefully they redo this course.

Richard Barkinskiy
Richard Barkinskiy
10,663 Points

This course so far is my least favorite at Treehouse. Really feels like it's out of order. I'll have to look elsewhere first (outside of Treehouse) to get up to speed in order to understand this daunting and overly convoluted course.

Going through the prerequisites for this course did not help at all.

indeed, I love the first part its perfect to get me some idea how they work along with Angular make me more motivated then later the second part in the middle of the video make me lost the motivated. it was way advanced for me. they are using the directive, filters and two others... Will I used it as beginner JS? I will do replay couple of months later. right now for me its worthless time.

Thanks for the responses, I'm glad I'm not alone. Thanks for the recommendations, I found the codeschool and thinkster.io sites to be very helpful getting started with Angular.

Kostas Oreopoulos
Kostas Oreopoulos
15,184 Points

This course is simply bad because you are not building knowledge. Pieces here, pieces there. Nothing to build from ground up and understand what is going on.

Having said that, the workshop on AngularJS here in Treehouse is much much better.

It would make much more sense to make small apps , starting from scratch and building app, explaining what is going on. Focusing on "ideas" out of context is completly meaningless. In the end of the day you simply cannot do anything.

The course takes another approach. It tries to introduce an anglularJs idea by talking and using code snippets. This simply does not work because we are talking about interconnected ideas. Its not introducing a for-next loop, or another self contained idea

The only way that such a course would work, would be start a project from scratch and gradually introduce ideas, delete previous code by introducing new concepts.. etc... This is not easy ofcourse and requires very detailed planning

p.s 1 : I am not a beginner in programming. ps. 2: What i would really like would be a workshop (in parts ofcourse), like the one from Jim Hoskins that uses the MEAN stack to create a full web application from scratch.

hi David Schreiter ,

sorry to hear you are so confused. Angular.JS and the whole study of Model-View-Controller frameworks (MVC) can be daunting. it's a bit like a crash course in modern software development theory and putting it into practice.

if you can't get the "Launch Workspace" to work, i would write help@teamtreehouse.com and see if they can help you. i will say that in this part of the module, the workspace does not match what is in the video, and that might be something that course instructor Alex Vanston might want to look at.

you can scroll down below the video and download the code for all stages of this AngularJS module from the Download link and follow along with that. also, in the teacher's notes for this video, Alex has posted two links to both the HalloJS web site and his own example of how HalloJS works in a JS Fiddle you can follow along with.

so all the tools are there. at this point, i would just download the project code, and follow along, making changes that you see Alex do in the video. i also highly recommend the tutorial found at the AngularJS Web Site, which also covers a lot of this. for now, just follow along with the part Alex is showing - in this video, it's the "plumbing" under the hood for how two-way data binding works in the HTML code and the JavaScript with ng-model. in the next, he'll go over what $scope means and why it is so important in AngularJS code. just pay attention to the one concept Alex is trying to put across in a given video and play with that in the downloadable code, and you should be o.k.

i hope this helps you break down learning AngularJS into more manageable chunks for yourself.

best,

-- faddah wolf portland, oregon, u.s.a.

Jeff Everhart
Jeff Everhart
21,732 Points

Yes, I would recommend the Angular JS PhoneCatApp tutorial as well: https://docs.angularjs.org/tutorial

I was able to glean more understanding from the Angular JS tutorials in ten minutes than the thirty minutes I tried to spend watching these videos.

heinrich tremblay
heinrich tremblay
32,115 Points

Agree, this course should follow the same structure than the others lessons like those by Andrew Chalker. I'm totally lost on this one...

Andrew Cox
Andrew Cox
11,374 Points

I have to agree with the majority of comments here. It's not that the subject matter is too advanced, it's just that the information is poorly structured. If they are assuming that people already have experience with Angular, then they should mention that up front, and I would assume that ng-repeat / ng-model would be the very first directives an intermediate user should already know. So there's some mixed signals going on there, as well.

This is the second time I've started and stopped this course, for the reasons mentioned above. Luckily, the Code School Angular course is amazing and free. I guess I'll go back and finish that up instead.

Austin Langdon
Austin Langdon
12,667 Points

Keep in mind Treehouse has classified this course as Advanced. Hopefully there is an AngulaJS Basics course in the pipeline.

Roland Cedo
Roland Cedo
21,261 Points

I feel the same as OP, it was a bit quick and out of order for my liking. . After some scouring I found a great video on YouTube about Angular that explains all it's moving parts for the beginner like myself. It's call Angular in 60-ish minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MHigUZKEM

I'm coming from a background of only learning JS here on Treehouse and I found the info in the video mentioned was extremely well paced and understandable for someone like myself.

Also, there is a Udemy course the publisher of that video posted which is by far the best online video resource I've come across so far about Angular. Let me know what you guys think.

I'm still a TH die hard, I'll just come back to this one when my Angular is a bit more polished to see if I can't get any more from it.

Kostas Oreopoulos
Kostas Oreopoulos
15,184 Points

The Treehouse Workshop on Angular (by Jim Hoskins) is really great. (10/10) It starts from scratch (as one teaching a first class in Angular should) and builds a very simple app. You get to see all components in action, but before actually goint to the final solution he goes for the incremental logical step.

  • So before introducing a "view" he first does that on the index page. Then introduces the views and partial files
  • He first does all jsonp calls from the controller as a begginer should do because it just works and THEN he introduces factories
  • creates a custom filter when its time to do so... etc
  • It does not use any "code generators" like Yeoman and that is GREAT. I mean you want to teach someone something and you start with premade templates and you fill in the blanks? How is one supposed to learn what is a choice and what is mandatory. This is why a hate most ruby tutorials. To make teaching shorter they start with scaffolding. For me this is pure bad teaching practice.

After going throught that tutorial, then this tutorial makes more sense.

Aaron Brewer
Aaron Brewer
7,939 Points

Yeah, I've been through quite a bit of video courses for AngularJS and this is by far the most unstructured. Don't get me wrong, Treehouse is awesome with presenting concise and nice learning material. But this course seems rather rushed and has no structure.

Adam Duffield
Adam Duffield
30,494 Points

I don't know whether it's new teachers or a new structure of how to go through a course or topic but the newer content seems to be rushed and all over the place! Struggling to make sense of this course, seems to be a lot of the phrase "Don't worry about the syntax, we'll get to that later" when I still have no idea what I'm looking at. I love treehouse and I was really looking forward to this course but as seen in the above comments too this course hasn't been to the usual Treehouse standard I am used too!

Chris Kwong
Chris Kwong
10,266 Points

Glad I'm not the only one. I moved from jquery to AJAX and I thought angular would be the next logical step, but I found that this course is very confusing in comparison.

Adam Duffield
Adam Duffield
30,494 Points

I hate to recommend something against Treehouse but in terms of learning angular I've found the free angular.js course with codeschool was exactly what I needed! Feel like a pro with angular already! In terms of learning everything else though Treehouse has been my first choice still.

For those looking for the code of the next code challenge:

angular.module('myApp', [])
.controller('myController', function($scope) {
  $scope.user = {
    name: 'Alex'
  };
})
.directive('myDirective', function () {
  return {
    require: 'ngModel',
    priority: 1,
    link: function ($scope, $element, $attrs, ngModelCtrl) {

      // YOUR CODE HERE
      ngModelCtrl.$render = function () {
        var contents = console.log(ngModelCtrl.$viewValue);
      }
    }
  }
});
Philip Campbell
Philip Campbell
15,324 Points

This tutorial is definitely weak. It assumes that I know more than I really do, and glosses over huge concepts with, "Don't worry about this. We'll cover it later." Meanwhile, I'm lost in the weeds. It really needs to be "dumbed down" for people who have never worked with an MVC before.

Technical definitions are worthless when I don't even know the basics.

Hey everyone, I totaly share your opinion here, I couldn't keep it up with angular, the course seems to way hight for that level, maybe it needs more depth into javascript, although I found that link that may come in handy in deciding what to learn as a framework of js and want to share it with you :

http://www.quora.com/Client-side-MVC/Is-Angular-js-or-Ember-js-the-better-choice-for-JavaScript-frameworks