This lesson will introduce what Angular is, and why it's a platform worth learning and using for your web apps. Angular is an open-source, front-end development platform that allows developers to build modern web applications. It was built by a team at Google using TypeScript, a language built off of JavaScript that allows you to closely define your data types and helps to catch errors before runtime. It's currently on version 12, and has a major update about every six months. This scheduling helps to keep your application up to date and secure without hindering the development process too much. Angular is most commonly used for web development, and that's what we'll be focusing on in this course. But it is cross-platform, meaning that you can use Angular when creating not only web applications but mobile and desktop applications as well. The framework is based on components, which are smaller pieces of the features and functionality that make up the application. A component could be something like a nav bar, a search bar, or a button. These components are then organized into groups based around the specific feature they help create, and these groups are called modules. This modular approach allows for greater code reusability, which can make your application development easier and quicker. Angular also comes with a wide variety of tools and features that further assist this process, like built-in routing services, reactive forms, or it's two-way data binding. Most other frameworks offer one-way binding. This means that the view is automatically updated based on changes to the model, but not the other way around. With two-way binding changes to the model are reflected in the view, and changes to the view are reflected in the model. All of this synchronization is done by Angular, meaning you don't have to write as many functions to handle all those changes. Between the data binding and application structure Angular is great for building single-page applications. It's able to update pieces of the view as needed, dynamically creating, altering, or removing components from view. All of this can be done without loading a new page, keeping the UI fluid for the end user. Angular also comes packaged with two different testing frameworks. The first, Jasmine, is used to run unit and integration tests, and the second, Protractor, is used to run end-to-end tests. Using these tools to implement testing and continuous integration for your app will help you quickly catch and fix bugs when pushing new updates, saving you tons of time and frustration in the long run. Angular has a large and active community of users creating plenty of resources that can help you when creating your own application. There is component libraries that could save you time designing the UI, tutorials and demos to help you learn something new, or forums where people can help answer specific questions that you may have. With all of these tools Angular is a great framework that helps developers efficiently build highly-scalable web applications, making it popular among individuals and large enterprises alike. Thanks for watching this video on Angular and its benefits, and check out the next video to learn how to install it and get started.