The tale of many developers once graduated is about self-learning; reading books and blog posts, watching videos and presentations, and sometimes sharing ideas with smart colleagues. Our world is constantly changing and there are always new things to learn, that’s why it’s so good to have an expert to teach you.

Besides short workshops at conferences, never had the opportunity to be trained. But destiny had my girlfriend working in Düsseldorf at the same time the Angular 2 Master Class was happening there, thus was the perfect excuse to attend and after talking with Pascal at NG-NL I decided to buy my ticket and go to Germany.

Angular2 Jump Start

Upon start of the course you get access to some of Thoughtram privates repos and the classroom platform to see the slides.

Then Pascal Precht and Christoph Burgdorf take turns when teaching, but the format is always the same: they present some concept of the framework and then you have time to complete the exercise while nice music is playing and they walk around helping.

The goal is to build a contacts app with Angular 2 and TypeScript. And this is a good first contact because the way of building the app is similar as we do with components architecture in Angular 1, but you get to play with some of the new concepts and specially with TypeScript.

Observables, DI, Forms and Routing

During the second day they introduce more advanced concepts and the first surprise comes with the Http service, as we say goodbye to promises and welcome observables.

Then they talk about form control and validation, that has some weirdness. And finally the long-time expected component router.

Unfortunately there wasn’t time for more and if you want to get deep into change detection or view encapsulation, you’ll need to wait for one of their specialized workshops (or they said).

Conclusion

It was a big investment and time will say if pays off, but it was really worthy to be there. I don’t think there is nobody in the world right now that knows more about Angular 2 than Pascal and Christoph, and you just need to check their blog to notice.

Moreover they are really friendly and patient to solve everyone’s questions. So yeah, definitely, if you want to get up to speed with Angular 2, even when it’s still beta, I would recommend to join any of the upcoming Thoughtram trainings.

The pace of the course is driven by the speed of the attendees solving the challenges, and this is my only snag because as we were not fast enough to finish the app during first day, then we had to rush over the more advanced concepts during the second day.

Thank you Pascal and Christoph for these two days! And all the attendees for creating a nice atmosphere.