Practical AngularJS Examples

It's difficult to know for sure without seeing exactly what you're trying to do but perhaps a directive is what you want?

If you're looking for general app structure tips then the Angular generator for Yeoman is a good place to start.

Use common sense. First step, having the files in one folder. Everything mixed up. You move into a structure of seperating services from directives, controllers from filters and so on. But the way most people seems to be doing it (the Angular way™) when it comes to the bigger applications is by splitting it up by functionality/modules. So you have a forum and therefore probably at least 3 different modules, "thread", "user" and "forum" or something similar. Just follow the MVC pattern with whatever filestructure that works with you and your team.

Copy/pasting the menu bars? For that, I would have a directive which controls the display of the menu and acting accordingly. Only when declaration is needed and it's reusable. I don't understand your point about meaningful urls though, they are as meaningful as you make them.

I used this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12592472/how-to-highlight...

Works fine, as long as your URL scheme structured enough. Toss me your email, and I can give you the controller and the tmeplate code with link to the live site. I would have copy-pasted here but don't want to turn HN into stackoverflow.

You can listen for the $routeChangeSuccess event from outside of your ng-view. You can attach arbitrary key=> value pairs to your routes to annotate them in ways that are particular to your app.

Hope this helps, let me know if it is unclear.

As for the structure, I tried Yeoman but quickly gave up due to learning curve and lack of time. I settled on a simple folder structure with minimal grunt file which uglifies and minifies my code. If minification/uglification wasn't a concern then I would have ditched grunt too. Not because I have issues with these cool tools, but purely because I just don't have time to understand them thoroughly. AngularJS itself helped fix my jQuery spaghetti wonderfully though.

Put your menu bar code in your 'master' template (wherever you're defining the location for your ng-view). Use a separate Nav controller for the menu bar.

It seems like your biggest issue is just data sharing, e.g. each page needs different menu items or something. Just create an Angular service that provides the backing data for the menu bar and exposes an API to other controllers to change things in the menu bar or get the value of a search field in the menu bar, etc. This type of thing is exactly what angular services are for.

Here is one of my angular projects:

https://github.com/polyfractal/elasticsearch-inquisitor

I'm not sure I would classify this as a "big" app, but it has four tabs and is slowly growing in functionality. The menu bar (and highlighting) is a very simple controller and service.

Obligatory disclaimer: I'm by no means an angular expert.

If you want to add a backend to your Angular app, check out AngularFire. Here's the quickstart guide and tutorial: http://angularfire.com/quickstart.html

The oreilly book is geared heavily towards best practise for just such apps.

Ace is open source: http://github.com/ajaxorg/ace

I'm guessing that he wanted to show how to write your own modifiable filter with a simple example

your right, they should prolly focus more on commenting there stuff then making an example in every obscure framework possible

I disagree. I went through the whole series and then, when I sat down to write an angular app, found that I had no idea what I was doing.

I recently viewed a few of their videos and I find them too short, seemingly lacking. It might depend on the audience though. In my case, a little theory and architectural overview works better, and the official docs cover this well enough.