Lean MEAN Web App Machine is for anyone interested in learning how to develop MEAN stack web applications. The MEAN stack is a collection of four main software application components (MongoDB, Express, Angular, NodeJS) that are used together to form a complete web application platform.

Lean MEAN Web App Machine is what you might call a tutorial-style guide. The material takes you through a series of activities that help develop knowledge by gradually building up a practical MEAN web app framework.

Lean MEAN Web App Machine is for you if you have one or many of the following traits:

• You are interested in learning how to create modern web applications;
• You are a non-developer, for example a marketer, founder, product manager or entrepreneur and would like to learn how to turn your great ideas into working products that you can evaluate, validate and perhaps even launch;
• Or perhaps you are a developer or programmer or software engineer and you like coding or perhaps you would like to enjoy coding more;
• You feel that traditional technical books can be a bit dry and sometimes too theoretical;
• You like to learn-by-doing. In other words, you learn best when you get your hands dirty working in a practical way with the very things you are learning about;
• You've heard about this MEAN stack technology and you would like a nice easy and well described way of getting to know all about it;
• You would like something to complement the great content you regularly read in blog articles, tutorials and other such sources;
• You sometimes find the material you use to learn either assumes too much background knowledge or doesn't go deep enough to get you productive;
• You would like to create your own web apps using the MEAN stack and would love a starting point.

By reading Lean MEAN Web App Machine you will benefit in the following ways:

• You will no longer be baffled by MEAN-related blog posts, tech articles, boiler-plates and generators that quickly drop ideas and concepts in front of you but leave you scratching your head as to what to do with them;
• You will have a solid understanding of the MEAN Stack ecosystem including its foundation components, some of the more advanced parts and supporting tools;
• You will be able to use the various parts, components, tools and documentation that are part of the MEAN stack environment on your own projects;
• You will be able to rapidly spin up a brand-new MEAN web app from scratch and be productive with it in minimal time;
• You will be able to have productive conversations with other technically adept people about some of the nuances of MEAN web applications;

Lean MEAN Web App Machine is structured around the idea of gradually building up a functionally complete environment, framework and code-base for a MEAN stack web application.

Many technical books tend to launch you deep into the background of a specific technology including its fundamental principles, architecture, structures, data types, etc. For someone just starting out with a technology, that traditional approach is a bit backwards.

The structure of this book addresses this issue by providing you with a series of incremental wins. Each time a new topic is introduced you get to apply it then find out a little bit about the thinking behind it. The idea is to take you from a minimal starting point all the way to a working MEAN 'starter kit' that you can use time and again as a launch point to kick off your future projects.