Monthly Book Roundup (April 2014)
Last months books include a couple more AngularJS related books. One about testing with Jasmine and another about AngularJS directives.
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Jasmine JavaScript Testing
My opinion of this book is a bit mixed. It starts out by going through all the coding hoops to make a jQuery based app more moduler and testable only to come to the inevitable conclusion that a framework like backbone.js is more appropriate. It was an interesting book, but I would have preferred if there was more of a focus on Jasmine itself (as opposed to backbone.js, node, etc). Another thing to note, is that this book deals with Jasmine 1.3 (not surprisingly), so you'll miss out on the much clearer async syntax of 2.0. While it wasn't quite what I expected, I did end up getting some helpful tips out of it.
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AngularJS Directives
This book is pretty great. Directives are certainly an aspect of AngularJS that need their own book and this does a better job of explaining them than anything else I've read. It goes through some of the built directives (like ng-repeat, ng-switch, form) quite thoroughly and really shows how powerful this aspect of the framework really is. There is an interesting directive example at the end (not the same datepicker example seen everywhere), that reinforces some of the concepts learned. My only complaint is that there isn't any mention of the parsers or formatters pipelines. Overall a really outstanding book though.