What Developers Were Fired Up About In 2017: Top 5 JavaScript Blogs

Find out the top 5 articles developers read on JavaScript in 2017—rest assured, each one is worth a read.

Looking back at the most read articles on our blogs in 2017 is telling, you can learn a lot about the topics developers were most interested in this year. The following articles have all been read over 10,000 times—some spawned intense discussion, others reverberated around the Internet, shared by fellow developers on social media, reposted in community websites and newsletters. All of them are worth a second read, not to mention a first.

Let’s see if there’s any top content you’ve missed:

#5: How I’m (Not) Using jQuery

by Raymond Camden

This opinion piece/tutorial opens by stating what it’s not about: “Let me begin by saying that this is not yet another post about how you don't need jQuery. In case you haven't noticed, that's already been covered. Roughly 8 million times.” I won’t tell you how it ends though; there will be no spoilers—I’ll let you find out whether Raymond is(n’t) using jQuery yourself. Extra fun if you also join the discussion that formed in the comments.

#4: A Step-By-Step Guide for Building Master-Detail User Interfaces with Angular

by TJ VanToll

Evergreen as TJ himself, this monster tutorial delivers on the promise to provide a comprehensive step-by-step guide for creating master-detail UIs with Angular, a popular way to build mobile apps. “Angular is well suited for implementing master-detail interfaces, as it has a number of the necessary features you need baked in, such as data binding, routing, services, and a whole lot more,” writes TJ. There’s one way to verify his words—read on.

#3: Quick Angular Hosting with the Angular CLI and GitHub Pages

by TJ VanToll

If you’re building up a prototype for a client, or a little app to show your friends and coworkers, the Angular CLI and GitHub Pages make getting a new Angular app live amazingly fast and easy. This must be why hundreds of readers keep coming back to this article every month.

#2: An Introduction to Observables for Angular Developers

by Jen Looper

When developing mobile apps and web sites, observables are often used to populate the app’s UI with external data, asynchronously. Jen does an excellent job presenting the abstract concept of observables in an understandable way. In this piece, she explains what they are, why they are a preferred method of handling data, how RxJS works within this context, and some real world examples of where they are used.

#1: Component Property Binding with @Input() in Angular 2 & Component Event Binding with @Output() in Angular 2

by Todd Motto

As Google released Angular 2, they inflicted some emotional damage on the developer community, lack of backward compatibility and all. Then brave souls such as Todd Motto sought to tackle this inconvenience and created AngularJS to Angular 2 migration guides for their fellow JavaScript developers to lean on. The increasing popularity of Todd’s two articles on component architecture throughout the year shows just how necessary and appreciated such content is.

#1 JavaScript Long-Form Content: The Future of JavaScript in 2017 and Beyond

Our most popular JavaScript whitepaper for 2017 was *ta-daaaa* The Future of JavaScript: 2017 and Beyond.” Don’t worry, it is being followed by “The Future of JavaScript: 2018 and Beyond!”

Thank you for reading so far. Don't forget to check out our top .NET content of 2017, as well as our top 5 blog posts on industry trends!