Full Stack JavaScript Development With MEAN: MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.JS 1st Edition

I really enjoyed this book - the focus on real world projects and making sure that you understand the basis of what you are focused on learning is excellent and I got a lot out of the process

Update: I had to downgrade my review and make a few edits because I noticed that the code sample in Chapter 18 is actually missing an *entire* Angular directive that the authors refer to throughout their commentary. That's unfortunate.Original (somewhat edited) review: This is one of the better books on the MEAN stack that I've read (the others that I've read are "MEAN Web Development" by Amos Haviv and "MEAN Machine" by Chris Sevilleja and Holly Lloyd; I prefer this one to the latter, and think that it is almost, but not quite, as good as the former). In comparison with the others, this book does a better job (IMO) of providing in-depth coverage of each piece of the stack as it is introduced and of covering "vanilla" Node.js (it covers building a small web server in Node without using a framework, and the server is no mere "echo" server; it includes rudimentary routing and so forth). It is also unique in that it discusses alternatives to the pieces of the MEAN stack -- e.g., MySQL, Hapi.js -- more carefully than any other similar book. This is helpful for contextualizing the MEAN stack and getting a more complete picture of the problems it is trying to solve, of the cases in which it might (or might not) be the best choice, and so on. I felt more confident in my overall grasp of MEAN and its relation to other stacks after reading this book.Having said that, there are some issues with this book that you'll have to be aware of (and be comfortable working around). As a previous (much more unfavorable) review notes, there are occasions -- though I found them to be rare occasions -- where it isn't entirely clear whether you should be working on a file in part of the overarching app that you're building throughout the book, or just working on a "dummy" file to get some concepts down first. It's also true that the GitHub repo for the book's code is not organized as the app is actually organized in the book, which is unfortunate. Additionally, there are a some occasions where it looks like the authors may have used some technology in earlier drafts of the book -- e.g., async.waterfall, in one of the earlier chapters on MongoDB/Mongoose, or the Angular directive that I mentioned in my update, above -- and then changed their minds but forgotten to take out all references to that technology, which could cause some serious confusion for some readers ("What do you mean we used async.waterfall? No, we didn't... And what the heck is async.waterfall, anyway?"). Even so, in the end, I liked the book very much and would recommend it for someone looking to get a better grasp of the MEAN stack.

While I wanted to like this book its simply not well organized and has a variety of typos that make following the code examples difficult.The book states that you are going to build a "working application" as you go through the book. In spread out chapters the authors try to get you to do this - unfortunately its not terribly clear when you are supposed to be updating the sample app vs when you are supposed to be learning new concepts. On multiple occasions, the "concept" code did not work as presented in the book. The sample code (on github) also did not provide a comprehensive listing of code examples that tie to what they want you to type in the book. If I had a working example for each one I could compare my code to theirs to see where errors exist - that is a common approach in technical books.Worse yet, the authors don't provide a "this is what your application should look like now" code example to match the end of each chapter where the sample project is extended. If your Node or Express server code is failing having a working server for comparison would allow me to see what I did wrong. Effectively, it would be far more useful to have a zip of **all** the files I should have at the end of each chapter that extends the sample app. Instead the github has individual files in a chapter folder with no context as to where that file goes in the sample application nor can I "run" their app to compare its functionality to what I created. The githib code makes it all but impossible to know if I have things correct in the sample app at any point as I don't have a project to compare it to.The early chapters in the book are a good overview to the MEAN stack and the early Angular chapters do provide a decent overview of that technology. That being said, if you want a book that is going to walk you through creating a sample app I simply find this book to be lacking compared to many other technical books I have read in the past - which is a shame because in general I do like SitePoint books.

-- THE GOOD ---A great introduction to the various parts of the MEAN stack, although not a replacement for a specific reference in any of the technologies. I especially liked the introduction to Node.--- THE BAD ---It doesn't look like a lot of effort was spent on editing. I don't mind the occasional typo, but it was a pain debugging the Mongoose code (aka callback hell) with missing and misplaced lines. -1 star.--- AND THE REALLY ANNOYING ---Sections like this:> Do you remember the npm command used to start a new Node project? Create a> new directory and open the terminal window in that directory. Within that folder,> initialize a new node application using the correct npm command. After that, install> colors and make sure the package.json file is created and updated. Next, create the> index.js file in the root of the directory.Since I didn't remember that particular npm command I had to look back through several pages for it. -1 star.In summary, a couple of easily fixed problems turned a good book into an average one.