When it comes to mastering Angular, adhering to best practices is essential for creating maintainable and efficient applications. Here are the top 10 Angular best practices every developer should know:

1. Use AOT Compilation: Ahead-of-Time (AOT) compilation enhances performance by compiling your templates at build time, rather than at runtime.
2. Optimize Change Detection: Leverage OnPush change detection strategy to minimize performance bottlenecks.
3. Organize Your Code: Structure your application with a clear folder hierarchy to improve maintainability.
4. Utilize Angular CLI: The Angular Command Line Interface makes it easier to generate components, services, and other Angular entities.
5. Manage State Efficiently: Use services or state management libraries like NgRx to manage state across your application.
6. Employ Lazy Loading: Split your application into feature modules that load on demand to decrease initial load time.
7. Write Unit Tests: Ensure your components and services are well tested to prevent future bugs and maintain code quality.
8. Use Reactive Forms: Choose reactive forms over template-driven forms for better scalability and validation control.
9. Implement Error Handling: Gracefully handle errors by implementing proper error handling mechanisms in your services and components.
10. Keep Your Dependencies Updated: Regularly update Angular and its dependencies to benefit from the latest features, improvements, and security patches.

Debugging is an essential part of the development process, and Angular provides a variety of built-in tools that can significantly enhance your debugging experience. One of the most powerful tools at your disposal is the Angular CLI. By simply running ng serve with the --source-map option, you can enable source maps, which allow for easier identification of issues by linking your compiled code back to your original TypeScript files. This feature proves invaluable when tracking down errors, as it provides clarity on where exactly in your code the problem resides.

In addition to the Angular CLI, the Augury developer tool is another resourceful option for debugging Angular applications. This Chrome extension enables you to visualize the structure of your application, inspect the components, and understand their state and dependencies. By leveraging Augury, you can easily trace the flow of data and events throughout your application. Combine these tools with regular console logging and error tracking practices, and you'll find that debugging your Angular application becomes a more manageable and efficient process.

Angular development is a powerful approach to building dynamic web applications; however, it comes with its own set of challenges. One common challenge is managing application state, especially as the application scales. Developers often struggle to maintain a consistent state across components, leading to bugs and a poor user experience. Additionally, understanding the complexities of Angular's dependency injection and lifecycle hooks can be daunting for newcomers. To overcome these hurdles, developers can leverage state management libraries like NgRx or Akita, which provide a structured way to manage state and make testing more straightforward.

Another significant challenge in Angular development is ensuring performance optimization. As applications grow in size, performance issues such as slow load times and laggy user interactions can arise. This is often due to inefficient change detection processes and excessive use of watchers. To tackle these issues, developers should adopt techniques like OnPush change detection strategy, lazy loading of modules, and optimizing template expressions. Regular profiling with Angular's built-in tools can also help identify bottlenecks and improve overall application performance.