Should You Wait Until Angular 2.0 is Released Before Learning AngularJS?

Given that it seems as though Angular 2.0 is going to be vastly different from the current 1.x, some beginners are wondering whether it would be a good idea to learn Angular after 2.0 is released. This blog post will help readers understand what they should do.

The text summary is written by the Codementor team and is based on the Codementor Office Hours hosted by Craig McKeachie, who authored the JavaScript Framework Guide. The summary may vary from the original video and if you see any issues, please let us know!

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It makes sense to start learning Angular in its current form now because you need to build the apps now. Based on what the Google Team have said so far, Angular 2.0 won’t be released until late next year, and that’s a whole year of software development you’d be missing out by waiting for the next best deal. Furthermore, the Angular team just released version 1.3, so it’s not as though you aren’t getting new features.

There are syntax differences among other drastic changes, but the Angular team is probably going to take other people’s negative reactions into consideration and bring 2.0 closer to the current framework. They likely don’t want to lose the big user base and community they currently have, so one can expect them to make a migration path that works. You can see already they have taken a few back-steps in the recent controversy at Ng-Europe, and the best synopsis of this is at devchat.tv, where the entire Angular team talks about the issues of whether they’re going to support backwards compatibility.

Moreover, I do a lot of training for really large banks I can’t mention the name of, but I know a lot of them are moving their apps from Java # to Angular. They even have IE problems, so they’ll be moving to Angular 1.2 because 1.3 drops the IE8 support. All in all, because of this I think there will still be a huge community of people building AngularJS apps in its current version.