You can build single page applications with JQuery and/or AngularJS. In this lesson, John will look at some of the fundamental differences between the two approaches.
Out of curiosity, why not reference the $scope from within the controller for calling the method, instead of the way it was done in the tutorial? Is one way better than the other or is there a reason, thanks!
This is the "controller as" syntax. Generally recommended since 1.2. One advantage is that it makes the controller more like a "plain old javascript" object. One lest dependency to fake for testing.