title: So many missing pieces. Where to look next?
body: <p>Learning angular is a pretty frustrating process. I've just started the journey down this endless road a couple of weeks ago. I've gone through the <a href="http://docs.angularjs.org/tutorial" rel="nofollow">official tutorial</a> on the angular website, watched the first 40+ videos on <a href="https://egghead.io/lessons" rel="nofollow">egghead.io</a> and read through several other tutorials and examples. I'm new to angular but have a good amount of experience with javascript, jQuery, and knockout, but even after all of the research and examples I've gone through, I still can't piece together even the simplest angular app in a real-world situation.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is that most of these tutorials and examples try to show all the different parts of angular, including controllers, directives, filters, services, $http/$resource, routing, animations, etc.so you end up with this one or two controller app that doesn't have any substance but it incorporates the basics of all of these features. Now, strip away all of the features that aren't really needed for a simple app like $resource, routing, and animations, and add substance to the business logic and data management, and you quickly can see how many holes exist in these tutorials.</p>
  
  <p>For example, a tutorial will show how you can share data between controllers using services. It will go over creating the controller, and using a service to get the data from a server using $http or $resource. Then it will show that even though the request for data is asynchronous, there is rarely a need for callbacks because the data-bindings will just be empty until the data arrives and then magically filled in. Now you have a reusable service to get data in all of your controllers. </p>
  
  <p>Wow! everything is so simple and clean, and it just works! Angular is awesome! Then, of course, when you go to write an actual app that needs more than one controller, and the controllers all depend on the same data, and you add something called "business logic" that is also shared and uses this data, you immediately realize things aren't so simple. </p>
  
  <p>First of all, as soon as you add business logic that has to use the data from the server (like with any real app), your clean code with no callbacks is broken. You now have to implement callbacks everywhere, because you have to wait for the data to arrive before you can use it. Second, prototypal scope inheritance becomes unreliable because you don't know if the data from other controllers has loaded yet or not. Worst of all though, there is nothing in these tutorials about how you are supposed to keep the data in sync between controllers, and with the server. If the data is modified in the scope of one controller, somehow all of the other controller scopes need to be updated as well... </p>
  
  <p>These are just some of the complexities that are introduced even with a pretty simple app that doesn't even use routing. I'm trying to make a simple calculator that doesn't persist data, and I am stuck with all of these problems and questions and can't find any real solutions.</p>
  
  <p>Can someone please point me in the right direction of a good tutorial, example, or book that will fill in these missing holes without getting into complex parts of angular that my app doesn't require?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance and sorry for the rant, this has been very frustrating :/</p>