I've been invited by Laurent Duveau to attend one of his Angular Academy 2-day training session on Angular.  Here are my honest impressions...

I had a little bit of catch up to do regarding JavaScript presentation frameworks.  I did use Knockout on some projects but for the last couple of years, I preferred watching the chaos instead of being part of it.  Now that a leader has emerged, it was time for me to do some learning.  I watched a few Pluralsight excellent courses and Laurent's invitation came at the right moment.

I was part of a group of 26 developers, some new to Angular 2 like me and other with V1 experience.  The prerequisites are simple: you must have some experience building Web applications with HTML and JavaScript but no need to know V1.*.  The course is delivered as a workshop so it is hands-on and you learn by doing.  I'd say that the ratio between theory and hands-on is about 1/3 slides and 2/3 actually coding and the way Laurent delivers this is quite amazing.  I was a Microsoft Certified Trainer teaching developers for many years and the format of the courses have not changed much in the last 20 years.  It's still mostly like this: the trainer teaches lots of theory and do some demos and the class listens; next the class does an exercise or a lab.  Repeat x number of times 'til the end of the training.  What happens most of the time is that students get bored when the theory ratio is too high and only half of the class really does the labs.  The way Laurent trains is like this: he delivers a little bit of theory then goes right away into demo mode except that the students must follow him, reproducing the steps he's explaining and showing.  The catch is that there are no lab manuals and as a student, you must really pay attention.  At first, I thought it was a recipe for disaster, especially with a class of 26 but instead of a lab manual, Laurent provides a series of code snippets that helps accelerate things when there are too many lines to code.  On top of that, Laurent provides the completed code in incremental steps or code completion so if you're really stuck, you just copy the step you're at and voilà, you're back on track.  It helps have the class keeping a good pace and never in the 2-day training that the class was slowed down because of students having problems.  This to me is simply amazing and an eye-opener on a different way of teaching.

In the end, you end up with an excellent Angular kickstart, enough to get you going starting a new project.  I highly recommend Angular Academy, look for it in various cities across Canada and also in private classes.