You hear a lot about data binding in AngularJS, and with good reason: its at the heart of everything you do with Angular. I've mentioned data binding more than a few times in my guides to directives and filters, but I haven't quite explained the internals of how data binding work. To novices, it seems like straight sorcery, but, in reality, data binding is fundamentally very simple.

It's official: paleo was the most searched for health term on Google in 2013, and, thus, paleo is no longer weird. Well, maybe its still a little weird, but at least people don't look at me like I'm crazy when I order a bunless burger anymore. As a matter of fact, I meet a lot of people who want to try going paleo, but they're held back by aspects of the paleo lifestyle that seem beyond the pale to the average New York office worker.

My directives post seems to have gone over well. I've received emails and comments from readers expressing how much it helped them, so I figured I'd write a post about one of the simultaneously oldest, most useful, and most under appreciated AngularJS features.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the single most important quality that differentiates a good software developer from an excellent software developer is the ability to spend hours on a problem where he doesn't know if or when he'll find the correct answer. No matter how many unit tests you write or how disciplined your coding practice is, there will inevitably be bugs. Not only that, there will be those annoying, frustrating bugs that you can't seem to duplicate and you spend hours grinding your teeth trying to figure out why the damn thing doesn't work. As a matter of fact, when I'm conducting an interview, I often explicitly give people a question that is too difficult to solve in the allotted timeframe, just to see how well the interviewee deals with coming to the realization that they didn't "ace" the interview.

Displaying prices in different currencies is a common internationalization task for web developers. However, this task can be a bit tricky:

AngularJS is blowing up right now, and with good reason. There's nothing more satisfying than using AngularJS to turn 1,000 messy lines of Backbone.js and jQuery spaghetti code into a trivial 10 lines. To put it in a broader context, you can think of AngularJS' place in the world this way: AngularJS is to jQuery as C++11 is to x86 Assembly. However, your quest to capture all the wonderful benefits of AngularJS may be hindered because the documentation is a bit difficult to wrap your mind around. In particular, many readers have told me that the documentation for directives is pretty intimidating, and a lot of experienced users still don't quite grok how to use them properly.

In last week's blog post, I showed you how to install all of the basic tools that you need to get up and running with the MEAN Stack. Didn't catch that one and need help getting started with the MEAN Stack? You can find everything you need in Introduction to the MEAN Stack, Part One.

I've received several emails asking for instructions on how to set up a basic MEAN stack app. I'm going to take it one step further and give you guys a two-part post that will walk you through creating your first MEAN stack app- from installing the tools to actually writing the code. In Part One we'll go through the setup and installation process. Next in Part Two we'll walk through the steps for building a very simple to-do list. Part One consists of seven steps, although only the first two are are strictly necessary.