I'm glad I skimmed through "Understanding Angular" documentation section before going through "Tour of Heroes" tutorial for the second time. Combined with my improved understanding of web development, this time I actually understood everything covered in the tutorial. The best example are Angular directives, which were mysterious black boxes the first time around. I copied them straight from tutorial text without much comprehension of what they did. This time around, I mostly understood how they dictated Angular behavior. I also understood that some of what I see are shorthand versions and, if I get too lost, I can go look for their expanded-out full versions which are more explicit in their actions.

I Know Where Things Go Now

One memory I had of my first run of "Tour of Heroes" were a few steps where the instruction was to copy a snippet of code into a specific file. However, they didn't say where in the file. The first time as a beginner, I didn't even understand enough to know where a code snippet should fit. This time around, I never felt that way. When a code snippet is presented, I understood the context where it should be inserted. This was a very satisfying feeling! Once I completed "Tour of Heroes" for the second time (which also went much faster) I had a selection of topics to explore outside the scope of the tutorial.

Need to Revisit Angular Tests

One candidate is testing. At the moment I'm completely ignorant about automated testing of web apps. I know such tools exist, but so far, my web app projects were tested manually when I played around with what I wrote. As my project size grows (and I have ambitions of bigger projects) this approach would not scale well. Angular has provisions for testing frameworks, which we can kick off with "ng test". Angular boilerplate includes a bare-bones test (filename ending with spec.ts) that went with the corresponding code (filename ending with just .ts.) Since the tutorial only changed code file without updating its corresponding test file, I ran "ng test" expecting to see test failures. But it appears I have some work to do before I even get that far, because I'm running Angular inside a VSCode dev container, and it doesn't have Chrome installed.

node ➜ /workspaces/angular-tour-of-heroes (main) $ ng test
✔ Browser application bundle generation complete.
11 02 2023 09:44:34.255:WARN [karma]: No captured browser, open http://localhost:9876/
11 02 2023 09:44:34.268:INFO [karma-server]: Karma v6.4.1 server started at http://localhost:9876/
11 02 2023 09:44:34.268:INFO [launcher]: Launching browsers Chrome with concurrency unlimited
11 02 2023 09:44:34.272:INFO [launcher]: Starting browser Chrome
11 02 2023 09:44:34.273:ERROR [launcher]: No binary for Chrome browser on your platform.
  Please, set "CHROME_BIN" env variable.

I know it is possible to run Chrome in an automated test where it runs without any user interaction or even a visible interface. I'll need to figure out this "headless mode" before I can run "ng test".

After a few minutes of looking around online, it appears running headless Chrome inside a container requires more knowledge than I have at the moment. Instead of tackling another new thing, I decided to practice what I've already learned. I will resume my tentative learning plan, which calls for me to turn my Tour of Heroes into a CSS exercise.