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Fran1409
Fran1409

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My first thoughts about Angular Material

I just had my first bigger project to do and we decided to work with Angular. My partner and I weren't really focused on the design of the app. At one of the first meetings with our coaches they asked us about it and suggested Angular Material. After that meeting we looked it up and decided to use it.

What is Angular Material?

Angular Material is a UI component library for Angular JS developers. These components can make it easier to create goodlooking web pages and applications. It will help you to have a consistent and modern web design.

Installing Angular Material

To start with Angular Material you need first to install it. You can do this with Angular CLI's installation schematic by running the following command:
ng add @angular/material

The ng add command will install Angular Material, the Component Dev Kit (CDK), Angular Animations and ask you some questions to determine which features to include.

On the site of Angular Material you have a getting started guide that you can follow. See the link below.
https://material.angular.io/guide/getting-started

Component

On the site you can also find all the components you can use. With those components you can create easy an consistent and modern site.
If you see the list of the component you can see a little example and a short description. If you go further into a component you see an overview and can look at the code. You have also the API that you need to import.
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In the navbar of the site you can also select a theme for the documentation. Then you see the examples in that theme so you know what to expect.
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My thoughts

In the beginning of the project I was excited with Angular Material. The site is clear and you have a nice overview of the things you could use. The installation was also easy.

At first I was figuring out how to import the code. That was also because Angular itself was new for me. But after I figured out how to import the API and found where the code was, it was clear for me.

I struggled sometimes with changing the colours. Because it works with a theme, the colours are fixed and if I wanted to change it with CSS it wasn't always the easiest. But at the end it worked for me.

So my first thoughts about Angular Material is that it's relatively easy to use. Maybe sometimes you are missing some extra documentation. It's also a more basic design so you can not expect something really fancy in my opinion. But overall it's a good UI component library to start with!

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